Visionary designer assembled cast of blockheads to enliven Lego’s playscapes
Their numbers have reached 7.8 billion if not more, roughly the population of the Earth. Their ranks include police officers and firefighters, pirates and knights, astronauts and elephant keepers. Their physical dexterity is limited, their facial features rather plain. But for more than 40 years, standing only four Lego blocks tall, they have been giants of the toy world and the object of untold hours of enjoyment for generations of children and collectors.
They are Lego minifigures, and their creator, the Danish Lego designer Jens Nygaard Knudsen, has died at 78. The Lego Group announced his death, describing him in a statement as
‘‘a true visionary whose ideas brought joy and inspiration to millions of builders around the world’’.
The Lego company was founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Kristiansen, a master carpenter, in the
Danish town of Billund, where he made stepladders, ironing boards, stools and wooden toys. It was christened Lego two years later – a name that combined the Danish words ‘‘leg godt’’, meaning ‘‘play well’’.
Over the decades, the company honed modern techniques of manufacturing plastic toys, patenting its signature stud-and-tube locking system for its toy building bricks in 1958. But until Knudsen’s innovations in the 1970s, Lego lacked a human or even humanoid element to enliven its playscapes.
‘‘There was something missing from the houses, cars, planes and fantasy world these children spent hours playing with,’’ Sarah Herman wrote in her book A Million Little Bricks: The Unofficial Illustrated History of the LEGO Phenomenon. Knudsen’s minifigures, she wrote, went ‘‘on to define and drive’’ the Lego system ‘‘more than any other part since the launch of the new Lego brick in 1958’’.
In 1974, the company introduced human figures best remembered for their appearance in the ‘‘Family’’ set, which included a mother and a father, a grandmother and two children, all with round yellow heads. They proved popular but were too big to be comfortably employed in the small-scale Lego world.
Knudsen, who had joined Lego in 1968 and ultimately became the company’s chief designer, was tasked with overseeing the development of a new line of miniature figures. The project took him and the company through dozens of iterations, including the faceless ‘‘Extra’’, which had stiff arms and no means of ambulation.
It was a start, but Knudsen wanted a character with greater capacity for play. Introduced in 1978, the blocky minifigure had movable arms and legs, C-shaped hands to grip other Lego elements, and basic if sometimes inscrutable facial features.
With its head made from yellow plastic, the minifigure had ‘‘no obvious ethnicity’’,