When I was a kid, Legos were good for three things—building towers; making a red, yellow and blue gun for playing Cops and Robbers if you weren’t allowed to have toy guns; and throwing at one’s irritating siblings. Times have changed (my brother turned out to be a nice guy, despite the fact that I threw toys at him; who woulda thunk it?). In the meantime, Legos have morphed into something of an avant-garde artform for the masses.
Case in point? Stop-motion animated Lego flicks are wildly popular all over the internet; they’re called Brickfilms (and that’s also the name of the top website for these plastic mini-epics) or, occasionally, “Bricksploitation” movies—a term I have incredible love for. Anyway, with all the specialized Lego sets made over the years—everything from Star Wars to Harry Potter to Indiana Jones to you-name-it—it was inevitable that there’d be Lego fan films. See for yourself after the jump!
• Say what you will about the UK’s loved and loathed newspaper, The Sun, but it ran a great rundown of Lego fan films recently, with everything from The Simpsons and Monty Python to the Beatles and Queen.
• Not to be outdone, the blog I check only about 30 times a day, io9.com, just did a piece on Star Wars Lego shorts. Lots of good, funny stuff in there, as you might well expect.
• That said, io9 left out one of my all-time favorite fan flicks, worth mentioning here: One of the earliest—maybe even THE earliest—was StarLego, made in 1990 by two Australian video game programmers using a 286 and a video camera. They didn’t have a hard drive, so they could only animate five seconds worth of material, then had to dump it to videotape, erase what they’d shot (no way to back it up) and start in on the next five seconds. They even had to write their own software to make this happen. Great results though–it still holds up as a laugh riot. (plug mode) You can find out more about it in my book on the history and future of fan films, , coming out October 15! (/plug mode)
• You’ll find a few fan-made Lego trailers to Harry Potter 4, 5 and 6 at www.lego-potter.de.vu. Even though they’re in German, they’re great—I used to show some of them at my fan film lectures and they always went over big, especially with the librarians….
Have a favorite Brickfilm Fan Film you wanna share? Mention it in the comments!
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