Another brick in the legend
We ponder the appeal of Lego, the children’s building blocks that have been winning hearts since 1958
Who doesn’t love Lego? Those distinctive, colourful interlocking blocks carry with them a sense of boundless possibility. Children love Lego because they can, in their minds at least, build anything. Parents love Lego because in building, there’s learning – although the relationship is best described as love and hate when it comes time to navigate a sea of jagged blocks scattered across the living room floor, or down the back of the sofa.
Big business loves Lego, too. Today, the brand accounts for a global empire of 125 shops, eight amusement parks and a clothes range. Those stacks of bricks have inspired rafts of books, computer and board games, and two Hollywood blockbusters. There is even a business consultancy brand, Lego Serious Play – in which adult participants solve problems in a virtual world with Lego bricks, and presumably come away better people.
All reasons why, in February 2015, business valuation consultants Brand Finance named Lego as the world’s most powerful brand – overtaking Ferrari.
Such accolades, corporate tieins and affiliations would doubtless have been unimaginable to Ole Kirk Christiansen, the Danish carpenter who coined the term Lego in 1934 for his series of wooden toys, adapting the name from the Danish phrase leg godt (play well).
More than eight decades later, the Lego empire continues to build upwards, brick by brick.
Bucking a global trend of decline in the toys market, Lego posted a 10 per cent revenue increase in the first half of last year compared with the same period a year earlier.
The UAE’s relationship with Lego is blooming. This week, it was revealed Dubai would play host to the Middle East’s first Legoland Hotel.
The brightly coloured 250room venue will include disco elevators and immersive play and adventure areas, and Lego characters.
An opening date is yet to be confirmed.
The hotel will be set in Dubai Parks and Resorts, within easy walking distance of the new Legoland Dubai and Legoland Waterpark, which opened in October and December, respectively.
The park allows visitors to gawp at 5,000 Lego model structures made from more than 60 million Lego bricks, and hosts 40 themed rides, shows and attractions.
Of the eight Legoland outposts globally – across Europe, Asia and the United States – four are less than six years old, and a ninth is to open in South Korea this year.
It is a far cry from the days when Lego lovers were forced to go to Legoland in Billund – the brand’s sole outpost from 1968 until the launch of the United Kingdom’s Legoland Windsor Resort in 1996.
It was before that date when, after years of nagging, this writer’s parents finally consented to taking one of its first family holidays to Denmark, ostensibly for no other reason than to visit Legoland.
The opening of Legoland Dubai represented a significant investment in the UAE, and naturally the opening did not pass without a certain amount of shrewd marketing preamble.
Shortly before October’s grand opening, Legoland Dubai unveiled the world’s tallest building made out of Lego, at 17 metres and weighing in at 1,000 kilogrammes. Emirati Mohammed bin Ahmed Jaber Al Harbi’s ambitious Lego-made Burj Khalifa took 5,000 hours and 439,000 Lego bricks to build.
Days earlier, the emirate also hosted the Middle East’s first Lego Stack event, in which more than 10.2 million bricks of all shapes, sizes and colours, weighing about 22 tonnes, arrived at SkyDive Dubai.
Families from across the region converged to attend workshops and watch certified Lego master builders at work.
Last week was the global release of the second Lego blockbuster – The Lego Batman Movie, an animated superhero caper that reimagines the caped crusader made out of Lego.
Such a pairing might have bristled with hardened DC Comics fans, but the critical consensus on the film has been generally positive.
After the increasingly dark onscreen turns the Batman franchise has taken – first with Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight
Trilogy, and later with Ben Affleck’s series entry in last year’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – the tongue-in-cheek cheeri- ness of The Lego Batman Movie is arguably the fanciful grounding the franchise needs.
At its recent opening weekend in the United States, the film grossed US$55.6 million (Dh204 million). Such an audience turnout would not have been possible without tapping into the vast resource of goodwill stoked by 2014’s The Lego Movie, a critical and commercial smash – banking $469m (Dh1.7 billion).
Future spin- offs include The Lego Ninjago Movie, in cinemas this year, and The Lego Movie Sequel set for February 2019. Batman may be one of the few international children’s franchises older even than Lego.
The caped crusader first appeared in Detective Comics #27 back in 1939.
A decade later Christiansen began producing his first Automatic Binding Bricks – modelled on Self-Locking Bricks from British firm Kiddicraft (Lego would eventually acquire the rights to Kiddicraft in 1981).
The Lego brick as we know it today – in shape, size, and locking mechanism – was debuted in January 1958 by Christiansen’s son, Godtfred.
A little more than a decade later there was the introduction of Duplo, a system of larger locking blocks aimed at younger children who might struggle with the precision of Lego – or swallow those smaller pieces. The Duplo range hooked new generations into the Lego universe, ensuring the brand’s longevity.
The next move was to increase Lego’s reach to an older demographic.
In 1977 came the launch of Lego Technic, a more advanced system complete with rotating gears, marketed to a mature, conscientious audience, which would ensure Lego lovers would keep building into their teens.
However, the most significant breakthrough perhaps came a year later with the creation of Lego people.
By offering the Lego world a human face – allowing children to make houses for people to live in and jets for them to fly – it paved the way for a whole new kind of play.
With these figurines Lego provided themed universes – such as space, pirates, vikings and Wild West – and the tracks were laid for the lucrative Star Wars and Batman ranges.
These ranges increased the market for kits that would be built once and displayed like a monument – therefore requiring ever more Lego to be bought – and ever-grander kits to be invented. These innovations have played a vital role in keeping Lego relevant.
However, the things Lego has kept the same should not be overlooked. A brick bought at Legoland Dubai today will fit snugly into one acquired back in 1958 – tapping into an intergenerational tradition, as I learnt this summer when I visited my brother’s home.
I found his two sons playing with several plastic toolboxes.
Inside, each was divided neatly into walled compartments containing dozens of tiny Lego pieces carefully sorted by type – exactly as I’d left them, two decades earlier.