Contribute to This Page Before you read on let me give the obligatory SPOILER warning. The thing is though, I often question why bloggers like me offer SPOILER warnings on stories like this because if you’ve landed here because you want to know the major plot hole, surely you’ve seen the movie and you know how it ends. If no, stop reading, go and see the movie and then come back here and read. I’ll wait for you. Everything is NOT awesome. Well, not in the Lego Movie, that’s for sure. I loved the movie, I really did. I loved it despite this problem I had with the movie; The Only Problem With The Lego Movie. And whilst I have only watched it twice, I have listened to the movie a thousand times because my kids have had it on high rotation on the DVD player in my car. I thought the movie was well written. The story line was great. And when it turned out that the movie was simply all in the imagination of a boy, well that was just the best twist because as someone who played out a million scenarios with my own Lego when I was young, I could relate.
I used to have my Lego guys explore “the real world” and interact with other toys and inanimate objects and the major “plot” of my storyline might have been their interaction with these things. If I was the boy in the movie you’d see me playing with the 1980-Something Space Guy or to be more accurate, the Blue Classic Spaceman as it’s known on Brickipedia.”I here you ask. You don’t need to use that language here. No, let THEM explain; Welcome to Brickipedia, a free online LEGO encyclopedia written collaboratively by its readers known as Brickipedians. The site is a Wiki, meaning that anyone, including you, can edit almost any article right now by clicking on the Edit link that appears at the top of a page. With 27,630 pages and 342 active users, we are Wikia’s largest LEGO wiki, founded on January 29, 2006. This wiki is based on the MediaWiki software used to run Wikipedia, and with the help of editors like yourself, we strive to be the best LEGO reference site out there.
That’s from the home page of Brickipedia. Although “Wikis” especially Wikipedia cop a lot of flack for being an unreliable source based on the fact that anyone CAN add their own information and the information doesn’t have to be true, it can be a great starting point for further investigation into a subject. When it IS fleshed out with correct information with citations by way of links to verified sources, Wikis can be websites you can have some faith in. And it’s what I read about certain minifigures that are now on sale based on The Lego Movie that I discovered this plot hole. It started with Wyldstyle. At the bottom of each Lego minifigure’s page on Brickipedia it gives some information about them. The sets they appear in, the similar features or bit they have to other Lego minifigures. Or – and this is where the penny dropped for me – the exclusive parts that they have. For Wyldstyle it mentions this about her; “Her appearance is similar to the Skater Girl‘s.”
So naturally I was interested in just how close to Skater Girl this minifigure of Wyldstyle is. The answer to that is “close, but no cigar.” Oh sure you could pretend Skater Girl is Wyldstyle, but she’s not. She doesn’t have the blue streak in her hair. She doesn’t have the black gloves (which one could take from another minifigure, so that’s not such a problem). And she doesn’t have that crazy design on her (what looks to be) one piece hooded jump suit. So I kept digging. Emmet Brockowski is the main character or protagonist if you will in this movie. When he’s not wearing his pyjamas or standing naked in the shower (or even walking out his front door in the nude) he is dressed in his construction worker uniform. The construction worker minifigures have been available since 2005, but not with a construction hat that has hair attached to it as Emmet’s has. Before he gets into his uniform, Emmet tries on many outfits as you can see in this official clip posted by Warner Bros. UK.
Those outfits that he tries on are all from the Lego theme; Minifigures (also known as Collectable Minifigures). Let me just explain that. Lego “themes” are a way of classifying groups of Lego sets by the subject matter. Space, Castle, Pirates, Western (Cowboys and Indians), Town (more commonly known as City today), and the licensed sets including DC Comic, Marvel Comics, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Lone Ranger, TMNT, and (my personal favourite) The Simpsons. The Collectable Minifigures were released in 2010 with there being 12 series of sets, each with 16 characters per set being released. The Series 6 set is where you’ll find the character known as Sleepyhead who is wearing pyjamas and has bed hair. This minifigure’s pyjamas and hair are used by Emmet in the movie but it’s not Sleepyhead that you see in Emmet’s apartment as the minifigure himself (Sleepyhead that is) appears in a scene that Emmet appears in later in the film. Series 6 is also the same series that Skater Girl was part of.
For Finn (that’s the name of the boy in “the real world” scenes in the movie) to be playing with Emmet as Emmet appears, and for Wildstyle for that matter, the outfits that they are wearing must have been available before the movie takes place. These outfits were created as part of the merchandising of the movie and therefore can’t exist before the movie takes place. Further, whilst many of the “extras” in the movie are minifigures that have been available for years, some of the extras in the movie were released after the movie as part of a Lego Movie sub-themed Collectable Minifigures theme including Larry the Barista, Abraham Lincoln and William Shakespeare, Gail the Construction Worker, the aforementioned Emmet with his hard-hat complete with hair, and the only minifigure that I have actually purchased for my kids, the Taco Tuesday Man with his poncho and plate of tacos. Now for me, the “pièce de résistance” in this discovery has to be our main protagonist’s antagonist;
Lord Business and his alter ego, President Business (or is that the other way around?) In Lord Business’ profile (also that of President Business) on Brickipedia is mentions that; So because these characters weren’t available before the movie was released, Finn could not have been playing with them to “make” this movie. Finn couldn’t have made many of these characters as well because some of their parts including President Business’ hair did not exist until the film’s merchandise sets were released. Once this movie brought the characters into the “real world” it puts the movie into a grey area inline with the whole concept of the “suspension of disbelief” where we are expected to assume that Finn has all these characters and parts at his disposal even if the parts and characters can’t exist in his “universe” until the movie is played out and then Lego creates them to support the movie’s merchandise interests. I could go one step further and state that having Will Ferrell play “the Man Upstairs” means that in the universe that Finn and his dad and their Lego sets exist in, Will Ferrell and his movies can’t exist, but then we’re just heading down the road of The Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis.
“But your just over-thinking it…” I know you’re going to write in the comments section below. And it’s you’re, not your. If YOU’RE going to come here and start pulling this apart, please get YOUR spelling right. No I’m not over-thinking it. The concept of the Master Builder exists in the real world as is evident in Lego’s own Master Builder Academy series. And whilst Master Builders in real life or in the movie are those who can take a look at existing pieces and turn them into something great, that’s just the thing; they need to have existing pieces at their disposal, NOT new pieces that suddenly appear to make a new character or an item. Now we’re just heading down the path of “deus ex machina.” There are many other characters from this move that have exclusive body parts, facial designs, and accessories that didn’t exist before the movie and therefore should not have been used in the movie. The movie technically should have only used parts and characters that were released before the movie was filmed.