Jens Nygaard Knudsen
Model designer who created Lego’s celebrated minifigures
JENS NYGAARD KNUDSEN, who has died aged 78, created the Lego minifigures which added a human element to the Danish toy building brick company’s playscapes.
The company had originally introduced human figures in a “Family” set in 1974, but while the set sold well the figures were too large to be incorporated in the miniature Lego world.
Knudsen was given the task of overseeing the development of a new line of miniature figures, and over the next four years, initially working by carving Lego bricks, he created 50 prototypes before he eventually came up with a figure three bricks high with eight movable parts.
These provided ample scope for adaptation, with C-shaped hands capable of gripping, and hollow heads which could accommodate different hairstyles and hats, enabling nurses to be transformed into policemen and firemen into astronauts.
When they were launched in 1978, the minifigures proved an instant success, appealing to children’s love of imaginative play, their integration within construction sets making Lego figures stand out from rivals such as Playmobil.
Initially the figures had “racially neutral” yellow faces, with happy or blank expressions, but in 1989 facial features were introduced to denote good or bad characters, and by 2003 minifigures had authentic skin colour.
In 1999, following a tie-in with the Walt Disney Studios’ Lucasfilm subsidiary, the first specific characters, based on the Star Wars franchise, were introduced, giving birth to a partnership that would produce not only figures and sets, but books, video games and animations.
In 2014 the minifigures starred in their own exuberant film, The Lego Movie, voiced by a starstudded cast, which won a Bafta for Best Animated Film and told the story of an ordinary Lego minifigure who finds himself helping to stop the evil tyrant Lord Business from gluing everything in the Lego world into a state of permanent stasis.
A sequel, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, was released last year and there have been several other spin-offs, all “based on LEGO Construction Toys created by Knudsen”.
Knudsen’s basic design remained unchanged. By 2018 7.8 billion minifigures had been made in some 8,000 designs, with the basic character adaptable enough to take on the guise of everyone from Darth Vader to Harry Potter and from Indiana Jones to Madonna.
Knudsen was born on January 25 1942 and joined the original Lego factory in Billund, central Jutland, as a model builder in 1968. His first task was to build hundreds of small “Lego Town” cars in different colours and he went on to design many of the early Legoland-branded theme park sets along with almost all of the Basic sets.
As time went on he designed bigger sets, including the Fire Station, the Police Station and the Hospital, all of which included rooftop heliports. With a colleague he also worked on an early Lego electric train system.
But, as Sarah Herman wrote in her book A Million Little Bricks: The Unofficial Illustrated History of the LEGO Phenomenon, “there was something missing from the houses, cars, planes and fantasy world … children spent hours playing with” – hence the minifigures.
Knudsen went on to create Lego sets, including the castle and pirate themes. He was also responsible for the first Lego space sets, which were voted European Toy of the Year at the 1979 Nuremberg Toy Fair. The success of the new line led Lego to hire 500 extra production staff and to promote Knudsen to chief designer.
He retired in 2000. Knudsen is survived by his wife Marianne.
Jens Nygaard Knudsen, born January 25 1942, died February 19 2020