LEGO memories
So much about me and the story I've been working on can be traced back to LEGO. The toy of my childhood. The spawn of over 70% of the story ideas I still hold today.
I can build a timeline with just the various LEGO sets I remember fondly, with the creative experiences that flowed from them.
So I will. I'm going to build a timeline literally out of LEGO. Through this, without giving much away, you can know me and my story in the works a tiny bit better. So let's go back.
1990s
The earliest memory I have of LEGO is playing with this 1997-98 LEGO Duplo Fire Truck Ride-On Storage Bin. As far as I can remember, this was my very first LEGO set. How fun it was! Building an endless cubic array of shapes, never getting tired of bending and twisting that hose piece, making my three-to-four year old self entertained with nonsensical imaginations. There's nothing else I remember other than being obsessed. Pretty sure I even tried emptying it and taking it for a ride sitting inside.
It'd be wild to say that it alll started from here. This is a timeline of both LEGO and creativity! I just think it's lovely to remember my first set.
2003
2003 was a hell of a bright year to my starry child eyes. LEGO was abloom with so much: Star Wars, Bionicle (OMG the Toa, Toa Nuva, Bohrok Kal, etc. 💜), Dinosaurs, Harry Potter, Life on Mars, and the one theme that captivated me the most, Orient Expedition.
Orient Expedition was the last line of LEGO's Adventurers theme that had been going on since the 1990s. My first set of OE was (first-pictured) [7410] Jungle River. I loved Johnny Thunder for the Indiana Jones-esque adventurer dude he was. I loved that crocodile piece.
www.lego.com and shop.lego.com were my most frequented sites when I first got onto the big lug of the computer. And, my God, its Orient Expedition page was my favorite. From its background music, its crisp vintage style, the brief character bios, andandand the god damn flash games!
Star Wars was a close second for favorite theme of that year, with Bionicle coming in a very close third. I would say Orient Expedition, Star Wars, and Bionicle were my three favorites and three most influential.
I chose the two pictured sets of 2003 in particular to feature here because they were literally the building blocks of the earliest form of my fiction. Around November 9th of 2004, with the yellow shrine hat of Jungle River and the Boba Fett helmet of [4476] Jabba's Prize, my older brother and I made a short movie.
"Small War"
Excuse the scrawled-out misspellings of my nine-year old self, but yes, we called it "Small War." The premise being that my brother and I were scientists that created a shrinking ray that either malfunctioned or was misused by one of us and resulted in us shrinking so small that we fell into a small world/city.1
This small city was abandoned and was composed of four buildings at the city's four ends, joined together by a criss-cross bridge. Each of the buildings housed an artifact. One held that yellow-shrine hat. One held that Boba Fett hat. And one held this enormous white opaque spherical crystal. Each one contained a special power.
My brother and I took two of the three. I took the yellow shrine hat and gained the power of super speed. My brother took the Boba Fett hat and gained the power of flight (duh, lmao). And apparently we had to defend the big orb crystal from two marauders that looked like C3PO riding the hovercrafts from "The Incredibles" movie—the ones Syndrome's henchmen rode (no doubting the inspiration there). We fought them off, earned/obtained the power of the orb or something, and we grew and returned to our macro-world and home.
It was a short silly movie of us playing our self-inserted selves. When we shrunk, LEGO minifigures took our place, moving by our camera-caught hands because stop motion was beyond us at the time. I do not know and do not think the short film has survived the test of time & software.
But this was the surest beginning of a story taking its deep root into my daydreaming mind, evolving, and persisting to haunt me decades hence.
2004 to 2006
The following two years were still such riveting times for LEGO. Their older IPs were still shining, they were venturing into new edgy territory, making new and short-lived partnerships.
I fell into a great love for the Alpha Team: Mission Deep Freeze Theme. In fact, that is one theme I got nearly every set of; six out of the eight, missing only the Scorpion Orb Launcher and (tragically {because I wanted it so bad}) Ogel's Mountain Fortress. The one pictured, the [4746] Mobile Command Center, was a treasure.
My brother and I made another short film of Small War featuring the vehicle with new characters joining us for the return to "small world." A couple of our cousins joined our film as their own self-inserts. One of them had a really interesting power: to be able to turn into a black hole. Artifacts were no longer a thing, so I no longer needed the goofy ass hat for super speed. Anyway, that vehicle made for an incredible HQ.
2005 came shining with the debut of the crown of cartoons, Avatar the Last Airbender. There is so much praise I must give to the shows, the art, all the media that I owe so much to, so expect more of my words on television in another post. All I will say is that by the time Exo-Force and Avatar made their LEGO debut and I got to get the sets pictured, the premise of my story was evolving fast.
Toward the end of 2006, my 11 year old die-hard fangirl self was remade into the story with a power inspired by derived from ATLA. Hell, I even scribbled a crossover comic around Christmas (yes it was a Christmas special).2
Exo-Force had such an interesting concept and premise—I've always been a lover of the man vs. machine stories—so I shamelessly threw a huge chunk of it into the story. At least in doing so, it became a blend, a slightly less fan-fiction-y one, maybe, or maybe it was more.
At least, it made something of a fun base for the story. A couple decades have gone by and it has shaped into something that is now organically its own.
The story sharing ends here for now. Why share so much of what's not yet published? What follows is a more vague timeline still built by LEGO, but also glued unbreakably with intense nostalgia, great and beating with the happy and sad song of my creative heart, a song once shared with others but has since quieted down to one I whisper alone.
2008 to 2021
My brother moved on to other film projects; my cousins my age grew to lose interest. The ones who shared my storytelling love the longest were my younger cousins. Longer still was the last cousin I shared the passion with, who I'll refer to as Rob.
We created so much with the LEGO I had, before hard times with maintaining/losing jobs (thankfully better nowadays) led me to regretfully sell most of my remaining sets. We made the kind of stories I used to make with my brother.
To my surprise, I inspired him to create a great big story of his own. The experience bestowed us so many ideas of our own for our stories. We enjoyed crossovers, RPGs with our minifigures, even explored the possibility of creating a webcomic together.3
He always had an extraordinarily keen, precocious, and inventive mind. Last I heard from him a couple years ago, he's done a bit of writing on his series. I loved his doctor/scientist main character.
We drifted apart in our separate lives in 2021, but today and hereon I carry an ineffable gratitude for that time when we shared made our universes.
Sets Rob and I built and made stories with:
Not that it matters because the shrinking aspect is no longer part of the story nowadays, but I could've sworn I had gotten the shrinking-into-a-world idea from that shrinking episode from Johnny Test—"Li'l Johnny"—but I just found out it came out in 2006! That's why I'm not sure if it was a world or just a random small village hidden within microscopic tufts of the rug. LOL.↩
Although LEGO had been the greatest creative outlet from my earliest years, by this time doodling was coming in close second. From this point on, doodling became a lot more frequent than my engagement with LEGO.↩
The story I am finally slowly writing into a novel was before considered to have potential for a LEGO webcomic. The likes of Reasonably Clever, The Adventures of the S-Team, etc. I oughta someday post my appreciate for those lovely pieces as well.↩