The LEGO Movie
So it's been a week and I'm still having a hard time formulating a response to the release of The LEGO Movie. I have a lot of conflicting feelings for a lot of conflicting reasons. Obviously the movie is fantastic, and obviously I should have accepted the job when it was offered, and obviously some of the reasons I had for wanting to stay in the U.S. back at the tail end of 2011 have turned out not to have panned out so great in hindsight.
The movie is an expression of all the ideals I spent a decade or more killing myself to force back into LEGO culture, any way I could, and now a bunch of other folks have gone and done it without me. On the one hand, I want to celebrate the fact that my side won, that what for years felt like just my little one-man crusade managed to eventually win over enough converts that it got taken up by people with money and influence. On the other, I'm trying to figure out what it means for me personally, now that the crusade has run off and won all its victories without me. I'm thoroughly upstaged; everything that used to be counted as my ideas and influence will forevermore be remembered as The LEGO Movie's ideas and influence. I'm no longer an important character in that story.
Meanwhile,
I've been having a series of running conversations in various places online, in which different people keep asking, in some form or another, whether The LEGO Movie is a BrikWars rip-off or not, and which ideas got stolen, and what my influence was, if any. And these aren't super straightforward to address; the short answer is no, it's probably not a ripoff, and my influence was probably pretty indirect. For the longer answers, I'm going to copy over a couple of posts from the discussion threads here for the archives.
Timedude wrote: So Mike, did you consult in some form on the movie? Or can you say?
Mike wrote:
- Not super directly. Animal Logic would call sometimes while I was still on Lego Universe, and we talked about different ways to do Lego concepting and scene composition and that kind of stuff, but nothing serious enough that I'd bill them for it or anything. And I've been friends for a decade or more with a lot of people who ended up being involved with the film production, both from the Lego corporate and AFOL side, so there was some secondhand influence for sure. They were looking at my stuff for inspiration at different times during development, but I don't know how much.
There aren't any ideas in there that were specifically mine, if that's what you're asking.
Timedude wrote: Just wondered. Saw some concepts that crept into both the movie and Brikwars.
Mike wrote:
- The one big contribution I can definitely point to is the original big BrikWars painting back in '02/'03. Back then, no one above the age of 8 was presenting this kind of post-modern genre mashup in a way that could be taken seriously. (Time Twisters was the closest Lego ever got, and apart from giving us Timmy it was kind of a disaster.)
A lot of people forget what Lego and the Lego community was like back in the late nineties and early 2000s, but everything was super-regimented and theme-specific, and as an AFOL you were allowed to be either Castle OR Space but never both. Lego as a company was in a kind of super brand-protection mode, putting the kibosh on anything that didn't meet strict brand and IP standards, and generally being jerks to anybody who had ideas that didn't line up with theirs. And so I was pretty pissed off about it for a decade or so, and BrikWars was my way of firing shots across the bow and just selling the hell out of this idea that nobody can tell me how to play with my Lego and I can make whatever stories and mashup whichever genres that I want.
And a bunch of people within the AFOL community and a bunch of people within Lego got caught up in this idea and dominoes started falling. The biggest one was Lego Universe, where they were doing the standard Lego single-IP thing and making a game about City and nothing else. Then one day they found the BrikWars painting, projected it on the wall, and said "Everybody stop. Let's scrap the game we were trying to make and make this instead."
Lego Universe got put to sleep after a year or two, but for that year or two everyone within LEGO and some tens of millions of kids got sold this idea directly, that this kind of unlimited freedom to do whatever you want is what Lego is about, not some carved-in-stone storyline IP like Ninjago or Chima or Knights Kingdom II.
So would something like the LEGO Movie exist without what I did to the Lego experience? Maybe. That's how kids have always played with Lego, whether or not adults want to admit it or approve of it or invest sixty million dollars into building IP around it. It's possible that Chris Miller and Phil Lord would have come up with this same kind of concept from looking into the way kids play and the kinds of brickfilms they make; they seem like the kinds of guys who might. (They're no strangers to ridiculous genre mashups; don't forget they were the minds behind Clone High.) It's less likely that Lego would have let them get away with it though. Left to its own devices, I think Lego's natural instinct is always going to be to try to make something like Galidor.
Kalvinator wrote: (also is Benny a reference to [BrikWars] for sure?)
Mike wrote:
- No way to know. There's a lot of "don't ask don't tell" when it comes to stuff like this, from a legal standpoint. If I get Lego to admit that it's a direct reference, then it opens up all kinds of legal nonsense, and then they don't get to make cool references anymore, which sucks for both sides. The same as if Lego admits that it knows about BrikWars, then they have to take a legal position on it one way or the other, and so it's better that they decide never to officially know about it.
So that's most of what I've had to say on the subject.
In follow-up discussions, everybody's been quick to point out the similarities between the movie's Benny and my Deadly Spaceman, and between the human hand in Emmet's imagination and my Human. But looking again, the really suspicious similarity is between the Von Bragstein Boiler-Mech and Metalbeard. That one's tougher to handwave away, but even there I can't really know whether it's meant as an homage or what.
The Boiler-Mech sat on a shelf at my desk at LEGO Universe and then at my current office for years, so who knows. Maybe somebody thought it was an official Lego concept or something.
