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BrickFair 2009: LEGO, LEGO, Everywhere!
By Matt Blum August 25, 2009
As you might imagine, it’s not often that I feel like one of the less geeky
people in any room. Yet I had just such an experience this past Sunday at
BrickFair. I found myself simultaneously amazed at some of the creations the
people there had made and extremely glad (for my wallet) that, while my kids are
huge fans of LEGO, they don’t hold a candle to most of the youngsters there.
It was an absolute mob scene, with a wait of about fifteen minutes just to pay
for admission. The crowd around many displays was two-deep, and the crowd around
the Mindstorms robot challenge area was four-deep. Still, my kids, my wife, and
I had a great time. It really is impressive how much creativity and devotion
many AFOLs (Adult fans of LEGO) and TFOLs (Teenage fans of LEGO) display in
their creations. There were train setups galore, spaceships of all sorts,
robots, giant cranes that towered at least five feet over my head, and even food
made out of LEGO.
I’m always particularly impressed by creative interpretations of familiar
scenes, which is probably one of the reasons I like the LEGO videogames so much.
There were a bunch of Harry Potter displays, taking the old LEGO Harry Potter
line and expanding upon it.
There were recreations of the ST:TOS Enterprise bridge and even of old-Spock’s
ship from the recent Star Trek movie. (This last one I found particularly
impressive because that ship was all curves, which for obvious reasons makes it
rather difficult to reproduce faithfully out of LEGO bricks.) The movie bit that
I liked best, though, was one of the simpler ones: A recreation of the stores
from Kevin Smith’s Clerks, humbly included as part of one of the huge train
displays.
I also loved, and my kids particularly loved, looking for the little Easter eggs
everywhere. Whether it was finding Luke and Darth Vader battling each other on
top of an otherwise-normal candy shop, or finding a shark-headed Viktor Krum in
the middle of an “underwater” display that bore no other relationship to the
Potterverse, we really enjoyed stumbling across these little surprises. I’m not
sure which was my favorite — possibly the Jar Jar Binks hanging from a turning
windmill, though I would have enjoyed it more if he’d gone flying off every now
and then.
I also learned a few things: For instance, did you know there was a whole genre
of LEGO creations intended to appear post-apocalyptic, called “LEGOpocalypse?” I
hadn’t, but I was very impressed by them.
I took quite a few pictures, all of which are available (and hopefully described
adequately) in this
Flickr set.
If you have a chance to come to BrickFair next year, I highly recommend it.
Wired:GeekDad
-end of report-
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