LEGO Studies

Examining the Building Blocks of a Transmedial Phenomenon

Mark Wolf, Mark Wolf, Mark J.P. Wolf, Mark J.P. Wolf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317935445
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Since the "Automatic Binding Bricks" that LEGO produced in 1949, and the LEGO "System of Play" that began with the release of Town Plan No. 1 (1955), LEGO bricks have gone on to become a global phenomenon, and the favorite building toy of children, as well as many an AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO). LEGO has also become a medium into which a wide number of media franchises, including Star Wars, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, Batman, Superman, Lord of the Rings, and others, have adapted their characters, vehicles, props, and settings. The LEGO Group itself has become a multimedia empire, including LEGO books, movies, television shows, video games, board games, comic books, theme parks, magazines, and even MMORPGs.

LEGO Studies: Examining the Building Blocks of a Transmedial Phenomenon is the first collection to examine LEGO as both a medium into which other franchises can be adapted and a transmedial franchise of its own. Although each essay looks at a particular aspect of the LEGO phenomenon, topics such as adaptation, representation, paratexts, franchises, and interactivity intersect throughout these essays, proposing that the study of LEGO as a medium and a media empire is a rich vein barely touched upon in Media Studies.

1
The Cultural History of LEGO

Lars Konzack

The LEGO Brick is a cultural object with its own history. It was designed in Denmark during the Cold War that followed WWII and has since swept the world off its feet. The history of LEGO has already been told; Jan Cortzen’s LEGO Manden: Historien om Godtfred Kirk Christiansen (1996) is an excellent biography of Godtfred Kirk Christiansen (1920–95), son of Ole Kirk Christiansen (1891–1958), which tells how Godtfred created the LEGO brick and became one of Denmark’s most successful businessmen; and more recently, Niels Lunde’s Miraklet i LEGO (2012) tells how Godtfred’s son Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen (his family name was spelled with a K due to a clerical mistake) continued to develop the LEGO Group, and how they changed to professional leadership in order to handle the company crisis.¹ David C. Robertson’s Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry (2013) is about the toy company as well, focusing on innovations; John Baichtal and Joe Meno’s The Cult of LEGO (2011) describes the consumer and LEGO-fan perspective with a little introduction to the company; and Sarah Herman’s A Million Little Bricks: the Unofficial Illustrated History of the LEGO Phenomenon (2012) focuses on how the LEGO Group and its products developed over time.² What remains to be done, then, is not the writing of the history of LEGO, but to put the history of LEGO into a general overview. Consequently, the aim of this essay is to comprehend the cultural history of LEGO from a broader cultural perspective.

An Overview of LEGO’s History

Understanding the history of the LEGO Group can be done in at least two ways: 1) according to leadership, and 2) according to the products. The Pre-LEGO Era is from 1895 to 1933, leading to 1934, when the company coined the name LEGO, a contraction of “leg godt”, which means “play well”. Before 1934, it was called “Billund Maskinsnedkeri og Tømreforretning” (Billund Machine Joinery and Carpentry Business). It was established by master carpenter Steffen Pedersen in 1895 and bought by Ole Kirk Christiansen in 1916. In the early years, it was a business that built houses in the summertime and furniture during the cold Danish winters. In 1932, as a consequence of the Great Depression, nobody could afford building or renovating their houses and the family was about to go broke when Ole Kirk Christiansen began the production of wooden toys, and bartered in kind, since most people at the time didn’t have any money. In 1936, the motto of LEGO was carved in wood stating “Det bedste er ikke for godt” which is often translated as “The best is not good enough” while in fact an accurate translation would be “The best is not too good”. If this sounds a bit odd in English, I can assure you that the motto sounds just as odd in Danish. The following year, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen began designing wooden toys.

The Kirk Christiansen family had a lot of trouble with fires. In 1924 the house and workshop burned down. His carpentry shop was struck by lightning in 1932. During World War II, in 1942, the factory burned down due to a short circuit. And in 1960, the wooden toy factory burned down again. Every time, the workplace was rebuilt, but not this last time. From 1960 onwards, the LEGO Group stopped manufacturing wooden toys.

After the war, in 1947, Ole Kirk Christiansen acquired the first plastic molding machine in Denmark, and the company started producing and selling plastic toys. In 1949, the first plastic bricks with four and eight studs were manufactured, and the following year Godtfred Kirk Christiansen was appointed Junior Vice President of the company. A few years later, in 1954, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, inspired by a conversation with a toy buyer from a department store, set out to design a general toy system, and one year later the LEGO System of Play was invented. The LEGO brick was about to change the company. The first bricks had the problem that they did not work well, because they easily came apart. The LEGO brick, with the stud-and-tube coupling system it has today, was patented in 1958. That same year, in which Ole Kirk Christiansen passed away, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen became head of the company.

In 1956, the first foreign sales branch was established in Germany; three years later, LEGO France, British LEGO Ltd., LEGO Belgium, and LEGO Sweden were established. The extremely fast expansion continued, and, amazingly, the small town of Billund got its own airport in 1963. By 1966 LEGO was sold in 42 countries worldwide. The new developments of the 1960s were the LEGO wheel (1962), light-brick (1966), battery-driven LEGO train (1966), motorized truck set (1967), automatic direction changer (1968), 12-volt motor in the Train series (1989), and LEGO DUPLO (1969). Furthermore, in 1968, the first LEGO-LAND opened in Billund.

Initially, the US market for LEGO was licensed to Samsonite for a nine-year contract in 1961 and included the Canadan market one year later. But the contract

FIGURE 1.1 Patent #3,005,282, for the stud-and-tube design of the LEGO brick.

ended in 1972, even though the Canadian contract was to end in 1986, because the LEGO Group wasn’t satisfied with the marketing and quality of the products being sold. LEGO had success around the world, but the American market turned out to be difficult. It wasn’t until 1978, when the LEGO Town, LEGO Castle, and LEGO Space themes were introduced, that the American frontier was won.

During the 1970s, many innovations were focused on play content. Some of the most important developments were dollhouse and furniture pieces for girls (1971), LEGO people with faces and jointed arms (1974), the expert series (1975), the town, castle, and space themes (1978), and the LEGO minifigure (1978). In 1977, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen officially joined the LEGO Group management team, introducing the future direction of LEGO themes, and two years later his father Godtfred Kirk Christiansen was appointed Knight of the Order of Dannebrog (Dannebrog is the name of the Danish flag, which is red with a white cross). That same year Kjeld Kirk Christiansen was appointed president and CEO of the LEGO Group.

In the 1980s, the themes continued, with many new LEGO sets, a clothing line in 1988, and a pirate theme in 1989. In 1986, Godfred Kirk Christiansen resigned as chairman of the board of the LEGO Group. Also that year, the LEGO Group was granted the title “Purveyor to Her Majesty the Queen” on April 16, the birthday of Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. At the end of the decade, Dr. Seymour Papert became LEGO Professor of Learning Research, and the first programmable product was introduced: LEGO MIND-STORMS (1989).

The 1990s continued many of the trends of the 1980s. What made this decade interesting was that the LEGO brand expanded into such a wide variety of products that the company was at the brink of collapsing in the early 21st century. By 1990, LEGO was one of the world’s ten largest toy manufacturers—and the only one in Europe; the others were located in the United States and Japan. LEGOLAND had, for the first time, one million visitors that year. And the following year, the company installed its 1,000th plastic molding machine among its five LEGO factories. In 1992, two Guinness World Records, one in LEGO railway construction and one in LEGO castle building, were accomplished. New themes such as DUPLO Zoo (1990), LEGO Belville (1994), LEGO Wild West (1996), DUPLO Winnie the Pooh (1999), and LEGO Star Wars (1999) were instigated. In 1996, www.LEGO.com was launched, and in the same year LEGO-LAND Windsor opened, followed up by LEGOLAND California three years later. In 1993, LEGO Kids Wear was introduced, and the first LEGO Kids Wear shop opened in Oxford Street, London, in 1997, the same year as the first LEGO video game, LEGO Island, which launched a new product line of LEGO video games. In 1999, Fortune Magazine named LEGO as one of the “Products of the Century”. At a glance, the future was looking bright for the Danish company. However, in 1998, the very same year that LEGO Media Group, in collaboration with Egmont Group, began publishing children’s books, and the Japanese Emperor Akihito together with the Empress Michiko visited LEGOLAND Billund, LEGO faced a deficit for the first time ever. The growing fear in the company was that future children wouldn’t play with LEGO bricks but only with video games, and that playing with plastic toys would become a thing of the past.³

By the early 2000s, the LEGO Group was continuing the expansion of new products as well as staggering deficits. Nonetheless, by the end of the decade the company had been turned around, into a grandiose success, and became one of the top five toy companies in the world. Creativity was unbounded at the beginning of this decade; the company debuted an apple that could make music for babies (2000), Robot MINDSTORMS Robotics Invention System 2.0 (2000), LEGO Studios Steven Spielberg MovieMaker set (2000), Jack Stone (2001), Alpha Team (2001), LEGO Explore Music Composer (2002), LEGO Explore Music Roller (2002), Galidor (2002), and Clickits (2003). LEGOLAND Deutschland opened in 2002. By 2004, as a result of a huge deficit, owner and CEO Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen appointed Jørgen Vig Knudstorp as the new CEO of the company, and in 2006 Jørgen Vig Knudstorp announced the Shared Vision—an action plan to save the company. In 2005, in order to get capital, the LEGO Group divested the LEGOLANDs to the Merlin Entertainment Group; it should be added, however, that the LEGO Group had a 30 percent share in the Merlin Entertainment Group.

While LEGO MINDSTORMS was a success and showed how LEGO could have a future in the 21st century, it wasn’t enough. More promising financially were the LEGO Star Wars sets (launched in 1999), as well as other product lines licensed from well-known intellectual properties from movies and television which appeared during this decade: LEGO Harry Potter (2001), LEGO Bob the Builder (2001), LEGO Spider-man (2002), LEGO SpongeBob SquarePants (2006), LEGO Avatar: The Last Airbender (2006), LEGO Batman (2006), LEGO Indiana Jones (2008), and LEGO Toy Story (2009), along with LEGO’s own Bionicle line (2000). While a lot of these licensed lines have been discontinued, they helped the company to solidify and regain market share. In the same period, 17 LEGO video games were produced. LEGO Bionicle was one of the most successful product lines of the decade, because the company owned the intellectual property and consequently could control the product, make their own storylines, and not have to share the profit. By the end of the decade, LEGO Board Games (2009) and LEGO MINDSTORMS 2.0 (2009) were launched and the LEGO Group announced a multi-year partnership with Disney Consumer Products obtaining exclusive rights to construction toys based on the entire portfolio of Disney and Disney Pixar properties.

In the early 2010s, LEGO launched several new video games (LEGO Universe (2010), LEGO Battles: Ninjago (2011), LEGO Creationary (2011), LEGO Friends (2013), LEGO Ninjago: The Final Battle (2013), LEGO City Undercover (2013), LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins (2013), LEGO Legends of Chima: Laval’s Journey (2013), LEGO Legends of Chima Online (2013), LEGO Legends of Chima: Speedorz (2013), LEGO Minifigures Online (2014), and more. In 2010, Hero Factory, a continuation of the discontinued Bionicle theme, was started along with LEGO Minifigures, LEGO Ben 10, LEGO Atlantis, LEGO Prince of Persia and a re-launch of LEGO Harry Potter—although Atlantis, Ben 10, Prince of Persia, and Harry Potter were all discontinued the following year. In 2011, LEGO Ninjago was initiated as LEGO’s own ninja universe. LEGOLAND Florida opened in 2011, and LEGOLAND Malaysia the following year. LEGO Batman was re-launched in 2012 as a part of LEGO Superheroes from both the Marvel and DC universes. Another well-known fictional universe, Tolkien’s Middle-earth, was licensed the very same year, and LEGO launched LEGO Lord of the Rings and LEGO The Hobbit. And LEGO Minecraft appeared that year as well. In 2013, LEGO continued licensing intellectual property (IP), with LEGO The Lone Ranger and LEGO Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and their own IP, LEGO Legends of Chima, and in 2014, their first feature film, the LEGO Movi e. And with the new LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 (2013), the future is actually looking bright for LEGO.

This overview helps one to get an understanding of how the LEGO Group has changed through the years; next, the aim is to put this into a broader cultural context.

Historical Epochs

First of all, the leaders of the company have had great influence in the decisions made, and therefore it is important to understand how they shaped LEGO. Ole Kirk Christiansen was the initial leader from 1916 to 1958. He started out as a carpenter and furniture-builder, but ended as a toymaker. Gradually, he gave more responsibility to his son Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, who ran the company from 1958 to 1979, although he was a member of the board until 1986. Godtfred was the inventor of the famous LEGO Brick. His successor, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, was in charge of the company from 1979 to 2004; he introduced themes and licensing, but finally gave in to competition and appointed leaders with business training and outside the family, and since 2004 Jørgen Vig Knudstorp has pulled the company through the crisis and turned LEGO into a success story. You could say that Ole Kirk Christiansen was the craftsman, the entrepreneur, and the self-made man, building products in his factory; Godtfred Kirk Christiansen was the inventor, designer, and manufacturer that made his ground-breaking idea of a toy system come true; Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen was the manager type, but eventually realized that the company needed more professional leadership in the 21st century’s competitive industrial world. Each of them contributed to the company with their own personal ideas and designs. In a broader cultural perspective, it shows how Denmark changed through the 20th century from an agricultural to an industrialized country and ended up as an information society. Ole Kirk Christiansen was very close to his local community of farmers while building up his local factories; Godtfre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• About the Contributors
• Institutions
• Prolegomena
• 1 The Cultural History of LEGO
• 2 Adapting the Death Star into LEGO: The Case of LEGO Set #10188
• 3 Middle-earth and LEGO (Re)creation
• 4 Myth Blocks: How LEGO Transmedia Configures and Remixes Mythic Structures in the Ninjago and Chima Themes
• 5 Chicks with Bricks: Building Creativity Across Industrial Design Cultures and Gendered Construction Play
• 6 (Un)blocking the Transmedial Character: Digital Abstraction as Franchise Strategy in Traveller’s Tales’ LEGO Games
• 7 Playset Nostalgia: LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game and the Transgenerational Appeal of the LEGO Video Game Franchise
• 8 Brick by Brick: Modularity and Programmability in MINDSTORMS and Gaming
• 9 Building the LEGO Classroom
• 10 The LEGO System as a Tool for Thinking, Creativity, and Changing the World
• 11 LEGO: The Imperfect Art Tool
• 12 LEGO Art Engages People
• 13 The Virtualization of LEGO
• 14 Bright Bricks, Dark Play: On the Impossibility of Studying LEGO
• 15 Afterword: D.I.Y. Disciplinarity—(Dis)Assembling LEGO Studies for the Academy
• Appendix: Resource Guide for LEGO Scholarship
• Index