A LEGO Brickumentary Movie Review

Reviewed by Lynn Barker on Jul 30, 2015

Rating:

Kidzworld reviews A LEGO Brickumentary, a film about the cool history and varied uses of LEGO bricks. The little building bricks have international fans and are used by NASA, architects and you!

By: Lynn Barker

If you thought LEGO building bricks were just a fun toy, think again! NASA engineers at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) use them to think up and build models of future exploration satellites. Architects use them to build their model cities and more!

LEGO New York CityCourtesy of Radius

Story Goes

LEGO building bricks were created by a Danish guy who originally made wooden pull toys. Ole Kirk Kristiansen, the company founder, came up with the name “LEGO” in 1934. He took the first two letters of the Danish words “LEG GODT”, meaning “play well”, and combined them unaware that one meaning of the word in Latin is… “I put together”. Once plastics came on the scene in 1947, interlocking bricks were created and by 1958, cool building sets were on the scene and the company HQ is still in Denmark.

LEGO octopus destroys Empire battle cruiserCourtesy of Radius

Building the sets grew in popularity until fans of all ages started making their own creations with them. Only when the company made the mistake of making toys with less interlocking parts and parts you couldn’t transfer to other creations, did they start to falter around 2003. But, they wised up and went back to basics. Now LEGO is right up there with toy giants Mattel (Barbie) and Hasbro.

A happy kid builderCourtesy of Radius

This film lets us know that LEGO bricks aren’t just used by kids anymore. There is a huge adult fanbase and they hold world-wide conventions with building competitions. There are fans who make stop motion films using their LEGO creations.. The recent The LEGO Movie used computer-generated (CGI) characters but in the style of the stop-motion fan builder/filmmakers.

Adult LEGO fans build at homeCourtesy of Radius

More recently, LEGO master builders used the little interlocking bricks to create a life-sized model of the Star Wars X-Wing fighter!! Artists use them to create large sculptures, NASA uses them to build spacecraft models, psychiatrists use them for therapy for autistic kids and they’ve been used to decoratively patch holes in buildings in Berlin damaged way back in World War II! More uses are being thought up all the time.

LEGO® FUN FACTS

Children around the world spend 5 billion hours a year playing with LEGO bricks
LEGO bricks are available in 53 different colors.
LEGO products are on sale in more than 140 countries.
The LEGO Club has 5 million members worldwide.
On average, every person on earth owns 102 LEGO bricks.
Laid end to end, the number of LEGO bricks produced in 2014 would reach more than 24 times round the world. 40 billion LEGO bricks stacked on top of one another would connect the earth with the moon.
Over the years, approx. 760 billion LEGO elements have been manufactured.
Two eight-stud LEGO bricks of the same color can be combined in 24 different ways. Three eight-stud bricks can be combined in 1,060 ways. There are more than 915 million combinations possible for six 2 x 4 LEGO bricks of the same color.
The LEGO minifigure represents the world’s largest population of people! Over 4 billion minifigures have been produced in the last 30 years. This is almost 12 times the population of the United States!
The average minifigure – with no hair or accessories – weighs 1/10 of an ounce.
There are more than 8 quadrillion (8,181,068,395,500,000) possible combinations of minifigures that can be made using all of the unique minifigure parts over the last 30 years.

Minifig narrator (voice of Jason Bateman) asks us to watchCourtesy of Radius

Wrapping Up

Whether you build with LEGO bricks or not, you most certainly have heard of them or know somebody who is addicted to building with them. This reviewer has personally seen an amazingly correct, life-sized LEGO statue of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack in Pirates of the Caribbean. This documentary explores all of the many uses of this product that was first conceived as just a toy. Now there are theme parks with giant builds and doctors, architects and NASA scientists are using the little bricks for all kinds of useful stuff.

Life-sized LEGO statue of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack SparrowCourtesy of Disney

There are a few “slower” parts of this short movie but, overall, the filmmakers do a great job of telling us about the history, growth and current uses of LEGOS. If you build with them or were just a fan of the recent The LEGO Movie, A LEGO Brickumentary is well worth a watch. We go 4 stars.