LEGO bricks and The Simpsons seem to be a match made in Moe’s Tavern. LEGO has released Simpsons minfigs and a detailed set featuring The Simpsons house, and the show went full LEGO for an entire episode this year. Builder Matt De Lanoy started planning his build of Springfield as soon as The Simpsons LEGO line was announced. He likes working on city layouts and has already constructed New New York from Futurama. His appreciation for including all the details shows in his reconstruction of Springfield. De Lanoy displayed the blocky take on Springfield for the first time at Brickworld Chicago earlier this year. As you can see, he included all the popular locations from the animated series in his LEGO diorama. There are buildings for Krusty Burger, Moe’s Tavern, the Kwik-E Mart, the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, and the Blocko store. The builder spoke with Mashable about his creation, and I’m amazed to learn he built most of the display between April and mid-June. It looks like it took more than three months to assemble.
He didn’t keep track of the number of bricks involved in the build because he’d rather not calculate how much money he spent. I don’t blame him; it’s surprising how fast tiny bricks can add up. Take a tour of LEGO Springfield in this fly-through video: You can see even more photos, including several close-ups, at De Lanoy’s Flickr page. What do you think of this build? I’m ready to shrink myself and go blocky so I can move in.When Lego announced earlier this year that it would be releasing a series of Simpsons minifigures, most fans of the show (or of Legos) figured they’d just be putting Homer or Apu or Nelson Muntz in a generic brick-based environment, or recreating a scene from the Lego episode of the show, or maybe just sticking them on a keychain. Not Matt De Lanoy. The 36-year-old graphic designer has been heavy into Lego design ever since the first Star Wars sets were released in 1999, and has been designing and building his own creations since 2004.
He even made a massive Lego version of Futurama’s New New York last year, so taking on another Matt Groening animated show required no deliberation—”I knew I would have to build Springfield,” he says. And so he did. De Lanoy started with the Android’s Dungeon (where Comic Book Guy works) in January, and made Krusty Burger in March; by mid-June, many thousands of bricks later, he had finished the gargantuan set he calls Lego Springfield. Don’t ask for an exact count, though. “If I know how many pieces there are,” he says, “then I could get a rough estimate of how much money I’ve put into the project—and if I knew that, it might stop me from building before I’ve even begun.” (He will say, however, that he has north of 500,000 bricks and buys more at least once a week.) Of course, after 25 seasons, The Simpsons has featured more buildings than even this massive installation could include “The first thing I did was consider what the most memorable buildings of the town are,” says De Lanoy, who lives near Chicago.
“I didn’t want to get too obscure, because when people see the layout I want them to be able to recognize the landmarks, even if they’re just casual fans.” He knew he wanted the whole layout to be 10 feet by five feet, and he was recycling the roads from his Futurama project, so he determined the footprints of the buildings based on those constants. Like so many thirtysomething fans of The Simpsons’ heyday, De Lanoy admits he hasn’t watched a new episode of the show in “well over a decade,” but he cites “Marge vs. the Monorail” and “Homer the Great” (aka The Stonecutters Episode) as favorites. Indeed, the Stonecutter temple is a fixture of his Lego Springfield, though it was a late addition. “I had considered the Courthouse, Burns’ Manor, and the Mafia’s hideout,” he says, “but I really couldn’t work them in well.” He’d originally wanted to create a working Escalator to Nowhere in time to display it at a regional Brickworld convention, but “due to time constraints, and knowing my very limited abilities with technical building, I opted to build the Stonecutters instead.
I still hope to build that one, though.” While Lego released a prepackaged kit for the Simpsons’ House in May, De Lanoy found himself unable to use it. “It was too big to fit!” he says. Besides, the kit version of 742 Evergreen Terrace was missing the bedroom area over the garage—so he designed his own version. He does cop to using the car from the kit, but had to redesign the roof (the kit version had a sunroof so Marge’s hair could poke through). Other than that, and some vehicles taken from recent sets based on The Lego Movie, everything is bespoke—or bebrick, rather. And yes, that means even Ned Flanders’ Geo. Animation isn’t the only target of De Lanoy’s re-creations. He’s also done scenes from Phantom of the Opera, Super Mario 64, even the beloved cast of Team Fortress 2. But the next big project on his list might just eclipse everything else. “I have two ideas I’m considering for next year’s Brickworld Chicago,” he says, “one of which would be based on Back to the Future.”
He won’t start working on that until early next year, but one thing’s certain: where he’s going, he won’t need instructions.Since their introduction in 1978, LEGO minifigures, also known as “minifigs,” have become arguably the most iconic aspect of the popular toys. These anthropomorphized pieces of plastic are a hot collector’s item, and with high demand comes high prices. These are a few of the priciest minifigs on the market today. Photo courtesy eBay user vsrg This exclusive minifig featured a red baseball cap, a printed Red Sox logo on the front, and a LEGO logo on the back. It was given away to kids attending a BoSox game in the summer of 1999. It’s unknown how many were produced for the promotion, nor how many survive today, but when they appear on eBay, they regularly sell to die-hard fans of Beantown baseball. A related Red Sox promotion from the same year was a 1” x 2” Duplo brick with the Red Sox and LEGO logos printed on each side. Today, this tiny little brick will fetch $100 if it’s in good shape.
As one of the biggest genre entertainment conventions in the world, it’s no surprise that LEGO pulls out all the stops for San Diego Comic-Con. In 2012, they offered a series of four superhero minifigs—each with a limited production run of only 1000 pieces—as a special giveaway. The heroes, DC Comics’ Shazam and Bizarro, and Marvel Comics’ Venom and Phoenix, were displayed on specially-marked cards that resembled comic book covers, along with a small brick to help the figure stand. Naturally, you’ll only get top dollar on the resale market if you kept the brick and card. (Buy Phoenix at Amazon.) Photo courtesy LEGO WIkia user Clone gunner commander jedi The enigmatic bounty hunter Boba Fett is one of the most popular characters in the Star Wars universe, and he’s also one of the most popular minifigs. Fett was first seen in LEGO form in 2000 as part of the Slave I playset and has been featured in multiple sets since. However, the Fett found in 2003’s Cloud City playset is one of the most collectible.
The figure was an update to the initial model and is one of the few minifigs with printed designs on the arms and legs. Photo courtesy LEGO Wikia User LEGOGEORGE One of the most fun promotions LEGO has offered has been the “Build-A-Bilbo” event at 2012’s San Diego Comic-Con to tie in with the release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. After first stopping by the LEGO booth to pick up a specially-tagged burlap pouch, a piece of minifigure hair, and a map of “ComicCondor,” you then followed the map to other Hobbit-related booths to collect various parts of the figure. If you completed your quest, you’d have ... a Bilbo minifig exactly like the one released later in a Hobbit LEGO set. But, if you kept that burlap sack and the map of ComicCondor, suddenly that everyday minifig is worth a whole lot more. Photo courtesy eBay user replaybricks If you were lucky enough to be in New York City’s Times Square in late May last year, you were able to see a life-sized X-Wing fighter made entirely out of LEGO bricks.
To celebrate, the nearby Toys 'R Us window offered an exclusive Yoda minifig with the purchase of an X-Wing playset. Unlike most Yoda minifigs, this one was limited to only 1000 pieces, and instead of his usual Jedi robes, this diminutive Master is wearing an iconic “I Love New York” shirt. In Yoda-speak it’s “New York I Love.” See Also: 19 Awesome Little Details in Special Edition LEGO Sets In 2011, lucky Comic-Con attendees could win the very first minifig of DC Comics’ Green Lantern. The figure was presented on a card made to look like a copy of the fictional San Diego Brick newspaper, with the headline “Super Heroes Unite!” emblazoned across the top. Obviously if you want to get top dollar for your Green Lantern minifig on eBay now, you’d better have that card. At the same Con, Batman minifigs were also given away on a similar newspaper presentation. Although it wasn’t the first time the Dark Knight had been seen in LEGO form (he’s been a staple character since 2006), it was an updated version of the figure with a more detailed print of his costume.
Photo courtesy Flickr user ftbt To celebrate their new line of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle playsets, LEGO offered an exclusive “Dark Leonardo” (some call him “Shadow Leo”) minifig at New York’s Comic-Con in 2012. The figure, completely black and gray except for his brown turtle shell and famous blue mask, came with a special NYCC skateboard for surfing through the sewers of the Big Apple. Not many of the approximately 500 Dark Leonardo figures have hit the market just yet, but some have sold for as little as $225, while others have topped out at $350. Meanwhile, in another part of the city, people showed up at Rockefeller Center’s LEGO store dressed as their favorite mutant turtle in order to get their hands on an exclusive minifig—the battle-damaged Kraang. Only 300 Kraang were made, and today they sell pretty regularly for about $100 on eBay. (Buy Kraang at Amazon.) LEGO gave away more superheroic minifigs at last year’s Comic-Con. This time around they had a hooded Green Arrow and black-and-silver Superman modeled after the costume featured in the film Man of Steel.
Both figures came inside a rigid plastic case with a background showing a city in peril, and were limited to only 200 pieces each, making them pretty rare today. Similar to their DC Comics counterparts, Spider-Man and Spider-Woman also got the SDCC exclusive treatment last year. Oddly enough, there are more of these figures out there—325 of each—but they actually sell for a slightly higher price. You can’t underestimate the popularity of your friendly neighborhood wallcrawler. See Also: The Time a Giant LEGO Man Washed Up on Dutch Shores Right photo courtesy of Ebay user Primobricks; left photo courtesy Ebay user DarthLuke13 In 2007 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, everyone’s favorite protocol droid got a bit of an upgrade. LEGO randomly added a gold chrome-plated C-3PO minifig to 10,000 Star Wars playsets. The figures were sealed in opaque white plastic bags, but the smart collector left the bag closed and can now sell the contents for hundreds of dollars on eBay sight unseen.
The Man of Steel made his minifig debut at New York Comic-Con in 2011 alongside additional copies of the Green Lantern and Batman minifigs from that year’s San Diego Comic-Con. Superman was presented with the same newspaper-style cardboard backing as the other two heroes, but there were only 200 figures available. Because Supes was so scarce, he demands a top price today. At 2013’s San Diego Comic-Con, LEGO employees wandered the Con floor and handed out the figures to random passersby. This Azog minifig is exactly the same as the one included in retail Hobbit playsets, but this one is packaged in a plastic container with a cardboard background that features the Comic-Con logo. See Also: 9 Very Rare (and Very Expensive) Video Game Cartridges Between April 30 and May 6, 2001, 300 alien minifigs from the short-lived "Life on Mars" line of LEGO toys were sent into orbit on the International Space Station. After returning to Earth, the figures were framed with a certificate of authenticity and handed out to attendees at a special ceremony held by LEGO and NASA, making them a rare collector’s item today.
After all, not everyone can say they have a minifig that’s been to space. Photo courtesy LEGO Wikia User Coo-Coo Cartoon At LEGO’s exclusive collectors preview party during Toy Fair 2012, the company handed out 125 special edition minifigs of Marvel Comics’ Iron Man and Captain America. Instead of being modeled after the movie characters that were available in superhero playsets, these minifigs were modeled after the then-current comic book versions of the characters. The Captain America figure has black arms and legs similar to the modified costume worn by Bucky Barnes when he took over as the patriotic crime fighter after the original Cap, Steve Rogers, was killed. The defining feature of the Iron Man figure is the normal-sized minifig head with a printed-on helmet. In the playsets, the Iron Man figure has an oversized removable mask so you can see Tony Stark’s snarky smirk underneath. The minifigs came packaged together and most collectors refuse to break up the set.
So if you want to get your hands on one or the other, you’ll usually have to buy them together. A few wise Toy Fair attendees have even included the badge and promotional flyer for the preview party in their auctions, helping to push the final price between $1500 and $2000. In 2010, recognizing how popular their little figures had become, LEGO introduced a set of 16 collectible minifigs, sealed in opaque plastic bags so no one could tell what figure was inside. The new minifigs included a caveman, a ninja, a robot, and a nurse. Since then, new minifig series are released every year. Series 10, released in 2013, featured an exclusive gold chrome plated figure known as Mr. Gold. This top hat and monocle-wearing, jewel-topped cane-carrying figure became the mascot of the series. Limited to only 5000 pieces worldwide, it has since become the single most expensive minifig on the market today. Prices vary wildly, ranging anywhere from $500 to $1100, so it really comes down to how much you need to complete your Series 10 minifig collection and how much you’re willing to spend to do it.