12 facts about Lego as block-buster hits screens
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MOVIE fans will be flocking to see The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part this weekend.
The new flick is
The Lego toy firm was started by carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen, from Billund, Denmark, who came up with the name by combining the first two letters of the Danish phrase
‘Leg godt’ meaning
‘play well’.
Briton
Harry Fisher Page, founder of Kiddicraft, first came up with the concept of self-locking building bricks. Under Ole’s son, Gotfred, Lego later adapted the idea for its own plastic bricks which were first patented in 1958.
Today Lego is worth
£5.8billion and selling
75bn pieces of the stuff, in 51 colours, every year. Some 36,000 are made every minute in Denmark. Lego is even the world’s biggest tyre manufacturer – producing 700million. MOORE
The moulds to make the bricks are accurate to within a two-thousandth of a millimetre.
Just six of the eightstudded Lego bricks can be put together 915m ways.
The first Lego mini figure, a policeman, was produced in
1978. There are now 4bn on the planet. The most valuable are two 14-carat gold figures of Star Wars’ Boba Fett, valued at
£8,000 apiece. JAMES There are 80 pieces of Lego to every human and if you stacked all the Lego bricks in the world together they could stretch to the moon – 10 times! In 2011 sets were taken into space by astronauts for experiments. Two thirds of British homes own Lego. Themes for sets have included everything from Harry Potter to Batman. In the run-up to Christmas, 28 sets are sold every second. The largest set ever made is a Star Wars Millennium Falcon spaceship, costing £650, with 7,541 pieces. There are nine Legoland theme parks in the world, including Legoland Windsor, the most visited theme park in the UK.
The tallest tower ever made from Lego stood 114ft tall, a Lego ‘tree’ in Denmark contains a record 6.3m pieces and TV’s James May once built a Lego house in Surrey complete with working toilet, bed and shower. Channel 4’s reality show Lego Masters proved a telly hit and the new movie is a sequel to the 2014 blockbuster, The Lego Movie, famous for the song ‘Everything is Awesome’. It made £360m at the box office.
Adult Lego fans are dubbed AFoLs and include ex-England football captain David Beckham, while Lego House singer Ed Sheeran once took some bricks to build while on a date. The new film sees Chris Pratt return as the voice of Emmet Brickowski as he and his plastic hero pals battle Duplo invaders. There’s a star-studded cast including the likes of Will Ferrell voicing President Business. New Lego products to mark the movie’s release include an ‘Apocalypseburg’ set.