LEGO (4 page)

Joe lifts a second cover.
“Ehh...
” A small sigh of disgust escapes him. “It’s such a fundamentally different building style. But it saved LEGO’s butt.”

The Bionicle line was introduced in Europe in 2000, and in the United States a year later. It’s science-fictionesque, based on creatures that are part mechanical, part organic. It’s the first LEGO line that comes with back stories and is actually registered as a separate intellectual property. Bionicle pieces aren’t considered part of the LEGO system, since they can’t always be snapped together with basic LEGO bricks. They seem like cooler versions of Transformers to me.

When I look over, Joe continues, “It’s not studs. The building is based on ball joints.” The heads and arms are all attached via circular plastic pieces the size of bullets in a pellet gun. Joe quickly builds a spiky red robot that he stands on a wooden table.

I hold up a yellow triangle that I have attached to red DUPLO bricks. “It’s Pizza Hut,” I joke. Joe and Duane laugh politely and I feel like a little brother who is about to be left behind by his older brother and friends.

 

 

A few hours later, I’m sitting across from Joe on the living room carpet at Duane’s house. I’m struck by the absence of LEGO bricks in what amounts to an ordinary living room. A few coats lie on a wooden bench next to a comfortable couch and an easy chair. Joe is busy shaking LEGO pieces out of the T-shirt they were wrapped in inside his suitcase. They are the remains of a miniature laser of the type that would have been operated by the James Bond villain Dr. No. Joe had constructed the tiny laser as part of a villain’s lair using LEGO pieces, even inserting an aftermarket series of LED lights that flashed rhythmically on and off. The Transportation Security Administration officials at Raleigh-Durham Airport were understandably concerned about the small flashing weapon in his luggage. It certainly appeared at least as dangerous as three ounces of liquid. The tiny laser is now in pieces, pulled apart by an overzealous airport screener who was not convinced that Joe’s vignette depicting the evil lair of a Bond villain was harmless.

Duane kneels alongside us as Joe separates out the parts. He is excited to rebuild, trying to remember how everything went together. I would be apoplectic. When Duane hesitates to play, Joe encourages him.

“Go ahead, nothing is stopping you.” Duane nods and picks up the tiny weapon.
“Pew, pew,”
he intones, the universal sound of a laser being fired.

Joe smiles as he reworks the base of the computer platform that “controls” the laser. He snaps on what he believes is the final piece, until he discovers an errant 1 × 4 plate. He has no blueprints. He is just building from memory. I watch his fingers work and notice that he confidently snaps together plates, even if moments later he changes his mind and breaks them apart. After a few minutes, he places the extra plate in his suitcase, satisfied with his makeshift fix.

Duane mentions casually that we might be able to go to Toys “R” Us after dinner, as his wife, Allison, peeks in from the kitchen and shakes her head slightly.

“Can we go to Toys “R” Us?” asks Joe.

“Please, please,” I beg. I’m sort of joking, but I also really want to go and buy LEGO. I will have to settle for visiting Duane’s personal collection. Just off the living room and down a flight of stairs in the ranch-style home is a cozy family room. It looks closer to what I imagined his living room would look like. Duane’s younger son, Benjamin, is playing a video game on the LEGO Web site where you attempt to navigate your character through a series of obstacles in a Donkey Kong-like game. The games on LEGO’s Web site are the only video games that Duane allows in his home.

“We don’t have video games in the house. I really try to avoid them. In the summer or after school, when we hear there’s nothing to do, the kids always end up picking up LEGO bricks,” says Duane, who almost flunked out of Eastern Michigan University because of the video game Missile Command, which proved significantly more interesting than his classwork.

Plastic tubs line the wood-paneled far wall, and a table is covered with gray bricks as Duane’s other son, William, a skinny ten-year-old with a shock of blond hair like his brother Benjamin’s, feverishly works to finish his moon base for display at the convention in the morning. The moon base is under attack, and a host of spacecraft in bright red need to be completed as part of the scene.

I begin to wonder if there is a LEGO genetic connection. Are we destined to build what our fathers built? It was Benjamin and William who rekindled Duane’s love for LEGO. When the boys were younger—two and four—the Collicotts bought a few DUPLO sets.

“I remember I was playing with the kids. I made a little boat out of DUPLO. I started to remember the aircraft carrier I had built as a kid, and the boat wasn’t enough. I wasn’t satisfied. It was then that I began to wonder if my mom still had the box,” says Duane.

She did, and she shipped Duane the twenty-pound box, the kind that holds printer paper, filled to the brim with LEGO bricks. Not long after it arrived, Duane was in the living room with his two boys building a Space Needle out of every piece they had. But it still wasn’t enough. That was when the idea for the bridge came about.

That need to acquire more pieces is easy to understand. A LEGO collection is quantifiable. You can physically see how many bricks you own. As I wander through the den, I start to think I’m not that different from Duane, because he doesn’t appear to have that big a collection.

Then he calls me into the laundry room, and I see where the LEGO pieces are hiding. The left half of the cramped space is dominated by a series of wooden shelves. Plastic tubs the size of shoe boxes stretch six feet across and eight feet high. Pieces are sorted by color and element type. And just then he removes a section of the wall, across from the laundry machine.

“You have to see this,” says Duane.

The four-foot-wide opening reveals a crawl space off the laundry room. Duane gets on his hands and knees, and as he disappears into the dark, I wonder if he’s going to end up in John Malkovich’s head, the size of the void being similar to the portal in
Being John Malkovich.

Duane emits a small grunt, and a translucent box slides out onto the carpet: Duane’s still with us. This is his other large project, the
M/V Stewart J. Cort.
He has constructed a nine-foot container ship, a scale model of the bulk freighter that plied the waters of the Great Lakes. There are thousands of pieces—and dollars—invested in the massive red boat.

“I’m using my brain beyond LEGO, especially with the scale modeling. You have to find a way to try and build the thing without using parts that are rare or cost a buck apiece,” says Duane, gesturing to the overfilled racks behind me.

As nine sections come sliding out, Duane tells me the history of the real ship built in Mississippi. How it sailed up the Atlantic Ocean and Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1972 until it was cut apart in Erie, Pennsylvania, to be combined with seventeen midsection compartments.

The completed ship was one thousand feet long, destined to remain on the Great Lakes—too big for the locks on the Welland Canal. It makes Duane think about his great-grandfather, who worked the iron ore mines in northwest Minnesota after emigrating from Sweden, since iron ore was the main load carried by the first thousand-foot ice cutter on the Great Lakes.

But Duane’s scale-model LEGO creation is ballroom-locked, destined to be whole only when it is on display at a convention. The nine-foot model always travels in sections. It is too big to display in his house, so it sits in modular pieces, the inner cargo hold built in the same fashion as the
Stewart J. Cort,
waiting to be connected. Duane will finish assembling it in the morning over at Brick Bash.

“I have a friend who is a magician. You don’t make money with magic, but you do get to perform. I guess this is a little bit for the ego, and I guess I just have to get onstage once in a while,” says Duane as he replaces the panel in front of the crawl space.

Duane admits that he usually doesn’t even keep the ship and bridge in the house. A friend lets him use office storage space.

“How many bricks do you have?” I blurt out, unaware that this is the single most annoying question to adult fans. It’s akin to asking someone how much money he makes.

“I don’t honestly know. Not that many,” says Duane. “But there is a guy with over a million bricks in his basement and garage in Columbus, Ohio. And you’ll see guys buy literally pallets of sets after they go on sale at
LEGO.com
to sell to other fans.”

The suggestion that Duane might have a relatively small collection floors me. I have one tub under my desk and a Star Wars set I’m ignoring. I thought that was a decent amount. I was wrong. He has two rooms half-filled with LEGO bricks and a crawl space stuffed with boxes, and he still needs a separate storage space.

This is what it means to be an adult fan. The slow, bloblike takeover of your home with tiny LEGO bricks that use up more room than I could have imagined. It is one thing to say that someone has a collection of hundreds of thousands of bricks; it’s another to see that you need a few hundred square feet to store them properly. My thoughts turn to the empty third bedroom in our house and what kind of shelving might work. I know that Kate will suggest that the unfinished basement would be a better option. I don’t need a man cave—I need a playroom.

“Purple” Dave Laswell stands behind his LEGO Millennium Falcon. It took him eighteen hours and forty-five minutes to build the 5,195-piece set, and that’s a fast build.

In the space of one day, I’ve met my first AFOL, seen his build room, and learned what it takes to set up a convention. But it wasn’t always this easy to find fellow adult fans of LEGO, in part because guys like Duane represent the first generation of adult fans. For the initial three decades that LEGO produced bricks, the idea that a child’s toy might become a touchstone for a grown-up community wasn’t on the radar of the LEGO Group. Certainly nobody thought that kids would keep playing with their LEGO sets into adulthood.

The LEGO plastic brick debuted in 1958. By today’s definition, the first “adult” fan (born the same year the brick was patented) technically couldn’t have existed before 1971, since the LEGO Group differentiates between child and adult consumers at the age of thirteen. When you factor in the Dark Ages, that period when people’s interest in LEGO goes dormant, and the time it takes for a toy to work its way into the culture, it becomes clear why the concept of adult fans doesn’t appear until 1995. And even then, you’ll find just a casual mention via an online newsgroup.

Initially, AFOLs were simply people who had an interest in talking about different LEGO sets, similar to Mustang or Coca-Cola enthusiasts. These connections were as much about the novelty of being able to chat with someone on their computer as they were about LEGO.

AFOLs gathered on the early ancestors of today’s social media world: newsgroups. The first LEGO discussion board for adults was a text-based Usenet discussion group found at alt.toys.lego (referred to as ATL). It still exists today as a combination of actual discussion and spam messages. But then it provided a chance to share thoughts with people who might be kindred spirits. It was a place to speculate about the inner workings of LEGO and discuss upcoming product lines.

“I have this theory that lego is organized into several teams of designers, each working on a line. Every few years (say 3) the teams’ new line comes out,” wrote Paul Gyugyi on December 1, 1993.

But it wasn’t until 1994 that the first inkling of a community appeared, when several active members of ALL formed rec.toys .lego (RTL for short). In contrast to the early discussions, where single posts lingered without a response for months, RTL users seemingly awoke to the idea that people could begin trading LEGO sets and even selling peer-to-peer. Perhaps more important, RTL gave birth to the “adult fan of LEGO.” Jeff Thompson is credited with introducing the term in a post about the hobby on June 13, 1995. A day later, Matthew Verdier introduced the acronym “AFOL” (pronounced
eh-fall
or
ay-foal).

“Anyone else notice this is an acronym of sorts. AFOL (Sounds like ‘A FOOL’) sorta like Adult Children of Alcoholics,” posted Verdier.

RTL developed into a hybrid between a discussion board and an online marketplace. LEGO fans alerted one another to sales and talked about what sets were available at which retailers, in an attempt to make up for the company’s fragmented distribution network in North America at the time. The users seemed to mirror the same professional types drawn to most newsgroups initially: male science heads with access to the Internet. In these early messages, there are plenty of references to software programming and e-mail addresses that correspond to labs, even NASA programs.