Based on a true story! My submission to an official LEGO Ideas building challenge. Backstory: in the late 1980s when I was around 5 years old, I had one of my fondest memories. My mother drove me to the King of Prussia shopping mall near Philadelphia, which was exhibiting a huge LEGO-themed event. The mall showcased numerous giant life-sized LEGO sculptures [similar to the ones seen at Legoland] inside displays; these were built by Master Model Builders. In addition, random stations were setup in the mall containing buckets of assorted LEGO pieces and minifigures for kids to play with.
This event overwhelmed me to say the least. I was utterly flabbergasted with excitement at the sight of seeing so much LEGO at that point, and my mom struggled to calm me down! The massive sculptures at the mall filled me with inspiration, as I had never seen anything of that magnitude in my life.
In this vignette, we can see a young kid me going berserk at the sight of a massive LEGO brick sculpture guy – an accurate reenactment of the events that took place one night in King of Prussia.
As for the build itself, this was a much streamlined version of an idea I came up with in early 2023. One day at the gym, I was pondering about the history of LEGO and how much the company/toy brand has evolved in the previous decades. I was starting to get fatigued from the over-commercialization of modern LEGO with the advent of licensed themes, and I started to long for the past when colors and pieces were more basic, and there was more room for imagination. This long thought process brought me back in time to the late ’80s when my mom took me to King of Prussia to see the exhibit.
With that said, I started conceptualizing a huge LEGO vignette containing a figurine of young me being in awe at the sight of huge LEGO sculptures at a mall – sort of an autobiographical diorama to emphasize the moment I wanted to devote my life to LEGO bricks. Due to size limitations in my current apartment, I never built this planned large-scale diorama. It wasn’t until spring 2025 when the Ideas challenge was announced, and I decided to bring back the concept – albeit in a more streamlined manner. For example, in reality the giant sculptures at the mall in the ’80s were kept inside glasses cases, which would not translate well to a physical LEGO build, therefore I created red velvet ropes around the mock sculpture. Also this scene depicts a simple square floor with tiles, whereas my initial concept would have depicted a segment of the mall’s corridor with shops, indoor plants, and more mall patrons visible. Instead I condensed it to one tiny vignette of young me going berserk at the sight of the giant minifigure.
The giant minifigure was a last minute addition, since I could not quite decide what the primary sculpture should be. In the actual mall exhibit, I don’t remember the precise sculptures on display, but I remember them being humanoid with yellow bodies. For this build, the challenge was trying to emphasize that the big minifigure was supposed to be a miniature version of a giant sculpture of a miniature object – which sounds utterly ridiculous when said out loud!
Although upscaled minifigures are not a new concept – as there are official LEGO sets which use a similar base model – I’ve created similar models and minifig body parts of varying sizes for my stop-motion animations such as Bort Sampson and Alice in Wonderland. I wasn’t able to make this minifig’s head round, so I just made it into a giant block.
