LEGO Dunder Mifflin Scranton Approved for Production →

The LEGO Ideas Blog:

A huge congratulations to Jaijai Lewis (aka LEGO The Office) as his The Office recreation has been selected as the next LEGO Ideas sets. This is a super interesting and entertaining television show that we feel is universally known and loved and Jaijai’s creation captures all the details of that story so well. It’s also very apparent to us how much desire there has been for a set like this after numerous submissions reaching review over the years. This time we had the opportunity and we jumped on it.

If you’d like to learn more about Jaijai then make sure to check out his 10K Club Interview.

I am very excited about getting this set when it comes out.

Designing the LEGO Shuttle Discovery

This morning, a new LEGO space shuttle went on sale:

LEGO Shuttle Discovery

This model honors STS-31, the flight that put the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit for the very first time. I love the way the LEGO Hubble looks.

collectSPACE interviewed LEGO designer Milan Madge, who led the project that has resulted in my latest LEGO purchase. It’s a great read, but this bit jumped out at me in particular:

The thing that really inspired that scale was the Hubble Space Telescope and the STS-31 mission because normally, when we do a space shuttle, the payload bay is kind of, well, I don’t want to say an afterthought, but it’s often smaller than it should be because of the constraints of working with LEGO bricks.

Being able to go up to that scale meant that we could get the walls of the shuttle thin enough so that we could keep the Hubble in an accurate scale to the orbiter.

[…]

We would normally not include that level of detail on a LEGO model. But by adding those details and being able to explain some of them through the building instructions, we are really taking people on a bit more of a journey. Hopefully when people build it, they’ll learn a bit about the shuttle, which they might not have done from a smaller scale model.

The Johnny Five LEGO set →

Andrew Liszewski at Gizmodo has linked to an amazing Lego Ideas project:

Number 5, a.k.a. Johnny Five, is the hero of the Short Circuit movies. Number 5 was one of five prototype robots, but after being struck by lightning gained a sense of awareness and free will. The multitude of his expressive abilities, combined with a youthful demeanor and thirst for knowledge (need more input!), made him an instant favorite with audiences in the 80’s.

This small model attempts to replicate the sense of wonder that the robot often displayed. It stands around 7″ tall and is very flexible. Arms, torso, head, and even ‘eyebrows’ can be posed however desired. Also featured are a retracting shoulder-mount and freely moving treads.

Johnny Five in Lego

TAKE MY MONEY.

Fan-built LEGO Saturn V enters production review →

I’ve been keeping my eye on this LEGO Ideas project page for a while:

This year is the 45 years Apollo 11 Moon-landing anniversary.

What a perfect time to present you the Saturn-V rocket which took the Apollo 11 crew to the moon out of Lego!

The whole Lego rocket is about 1 meter/130 studs high (aprox. 1:110 scale), has 1179 bricks and lots of features:

  • removable 1st rocket-stage with the main rocket engine
  • removable 2nd rocket-stage with rocket engine
  • removable 3rd rocket-stage with the Apollo spacecraft
  • Apollo spacecraft with the “Eagle” Lunar Lander and the Lunar Orbiter
  • the rescue rocket on top of the whole spacecraft
  • two minifigure astronauts on the Moon for displaying

The project has reached 10,000 votes, meaning it will be considered by the toymaker for possible production.

Sign me up. I’d love to have this sitting next to my shuttle.