On Steve Reynolds’ front porch is a Batman themed door-mat: bat logo in the middle and the words ‘Welcome to the Batcave’.
42 years old with a jolly figure, he leads me into ‘the room.’ It is gasp worthy. More than 50 Lego sets fill four repurposed display cabinets. “The cabinets came with the lights,” Reynolds says. They include everything from a lego haunted house to Lighting McQueen from the Pixar Cars movie.
On another wall are 560 lego figures, or ‘minifigures’. The range is disorientating: everyone from Aquaman to the Easter bunny. And that’s just a sample.
“I started buying Lego so that my older nephews could come over and play. It was just a matter of saying to my girlfriend ‘Yeah, we should buy it so they can play.’ ” Reynolds laughs and points at himself.
“Me.”
In the past five years or so, something happened with everyone’s favourite Danish export. With four animated movies, including The Lego Movie and Lego Batman, Lego has never been more popular.
But Channel Nine’s smash TV show Lego Masters showed Australia that Lego isn’t for kids anymore. An underground collective of adult Lego enthusiasts are finally having their moment in the sun.
But why Lego? What is it about these plastic bricks that thousands of Australian adults adore?
Before becoming the world’s largest toy company, Lego started life as a workshop for the Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen. He started selling wooden ducks and fire trucks in 1932, naming the workshop ‘LEGO’ — a portmanteau of the Danish words for ‘play well’.
It wasn’t until 1949 that the eponymous plastic LEGO bricks first came off the injection molding machine. These first bricks, hollow on the inside, weren’t particularly great for building. But nine years later the company added tubes to the bottom of the brick, and the Lego brick we know today was born.
The exact same brick. You can use Lego from 1958 and it will fit perfectly with the rest of your collection, granted a little off-colour.
More than 60 years later, LEGO Group (the company behind the brick) is a colossus. It sells 75 billion bricks a year to the delight of children. And it turns out, adults as well.
Most children stop playing with Lego as they grow older. They move on. In the adult Lego community, this called the ‘dark age’: the years when you stop playing and get busy with relationships, school and so on.
But for one reason or another, some come back. They emerge from their dark age and enter a Lego-themed renaissance.
They become AFOLs — adult fans of lego.
The reasons why someone comes back to Lego are varied. Lego is like a Rorschach test: AFOLs see what they want in the bricks.
Some see Lego as raw creative ingredients. You don’t have to follow the instruction, as you’d notice those on Lego Masters. The show’s builders delighted audiences with some of the most extraordinary concoctions that can be made with these simple bricks.
One of the most impressive builds is in Melbourne’s Legoland. The store features 1.5 million piece replica of the city, complete with Eureka Tower and Flinders Street Station, built by 15 AFOLs.
One of Reynolds favourite piece was completed a couple of month ago: an almost two-meter-long Scooby-Doo themed rollercoaster.
“This one I’m really proud of,” he says, pointing out subtle jokes in every nook and cranny. There is a shark eating a minifigure; the cafe is called the ‘Takamoto Cafe’, a homage to Scooby Doo creator Iwao Takamoto. That attention to detail means he’ll spend a whole year planning and building. “I’ll do things here and there, as long as I can get the parts.”
In fact, the build is so big he can’t fit it through the front door. It has to be squeezed out from the window in his Lego room.
This creativity also inspires some to imagine the bricks as not inanimate, but in fact storytellers.
A couple of years ago, Andrew Morrey wanted to make a sitcom. But he ran into a slight problem. “It’s too hard to organize humans” Morrey admitted. “You’ve got how many actors and mic guys and camera guys. It’s hard. Lego’s easy to work with.”
Morrey, 39 and wearing a flannel shirt with blue jeans, could pass as a Chris Evans stunt double.
He got past his dark age in his early twenties and started posting videos to YouTube and Instagram under the channel CheepJokes. His Lego shorts have now collected 9 million views on his YouTube channel, and 46,000 followers on Instagram.
Morrey is keen to promote the work of others, like the work of a 17-year-old kid named Christian Ribarich.
Ribarich is tall for his age, and dressed plainly. His desk and cabinets are brimming with sets, and a large yellow Lego head sits atop, staring blankly.
For Ribarich, the coloured bricks “fuel” his creativity. “I used to sort of make my own stories, make dioramas,” Ribarich says. “Then I got our family video camera.”
His shorts have became more complicated. More pieces, more scenes. Now he has plans for a stop-motion feature film. “I added more and more and more [scenes]. I got to 20 pages. I kept writing. I got to 40 minutes.” The film will now be 90 minutes, with 24 people on board including voice actors.
When asked why so many people are helping a 17 year old, he says “everyone is equally dorky, so you gotta unite.”
Instead of filmmaking aspirations, other AFOLs see Lego as a Delorean to a happier time. The nostalgia, both for playing Lego and the movie licensed sets, drives a lot of adults to get back into it.
It’s certainly true of Steve Reynolds: on his coffee table sits a Forest Men Lego set. It’s a simple set for Reynolds, made up of only a tree and a few Robin Hood look-alikes. But it’s one of his favourites.
In fact, it’s the first set of Lego he got for Christmas in 1987. Not the original — his parents gave his lego away when he “got into girls and sport” — but he was able to track down a set for himself. After a 14 year dark age, it was the re-release of those early sets in 2002 that got Reynolds back into Lego.
And the nostalgia, plus the precise and delicate process of building can sooth the mind.
Reynolds, who has had a history of mental health issues like anxiety, found that the slow process of building Lego was therapeutic. “Lego is one of those things if you’re following instructions, you’re just swept away,” Reynolds says. “There’s no thoughts. You’re just following the process.”
But for many, Lego is incidental. It’s the relationships they build that they savor. Where once you’d be alone in your Lego love, adult fans can finally find like-minded fans, whether it be online or in person.
Reynolds, a stay-at-home dad, doesn’t get many opportunities to meet new people. He finds himself at home most of the day, and “I could talk your ears off,” he says if given the chance. In this case, the Lego community has been a way for him to click with others.
While the internet is plagued by trolls and right-wing extremists, online Lego communities seem like an antidote. People share designs with each other over Lego-specific message boards and give helpful tips. They promote one another’s work.
And everyone knows everyone; the group is more tight-knit than a dozen headphones rustling in a bag. “It’s ridiculous. It’s amazing,” Ribarich says of the Lego community.
Since the community is relatively small, people are keen to help one another out. That includes sharing Lego pieces with other builders and filmmakers, despite the toy’s high cost.
“If I’m desperate for a part, there are people that are just willing to throw parts to you,” Reynolds says. “And I feel the same. If someone’s desperate for parts I pass them along.” As one of seven siblings, sharing for Reynolds wasn’t much of a choice.
I ask if he ever keeps track of who has what piece. “Not really. You just pay it forward. When I might need some pieces, I’d hope they’d help me out.”
One of the largest Lego community groups in Australia is the Melbourne Lego User Group, shortened to MUGs. “A silent ‘L’ I’m guessing,” one member said about the naming. Started 18 years ago, MUGs now has over 2,100 members that host monthly meet-ups.
In January this year, as they have for the past 13 years, MUGs hosted Brickvention: a massive celebration of all things Lego. Over two days, AFOLs and young enthusiasts flaunt their latest contraptions and ingenious designs.
The first event in 2006 had 200 people. This year there were 20,000 attendants and 300 exhibitors.
Reynolds relishes the chance to exhibit his work. “When you see kids rush over, or adults rush over at times, and they have a big smile on their face. You feel like you’ve touched someone, the emotion that Lego can bring to them.”
The event takes a group of 10 volunteers an entire year to organised and plan, orchestrated by MUGs president Annaleise O’Keefe.
O’Keefe’s love of Lego didn’t start until she was a teenager. “I had a brain infection when I was 16,” she says. For two years, she had constant seizures while doctors figured out what was wrong.
She struggled to read or write, and couldn’t go to school. “One of the only things that kept me sane was playing with Lego.” She found the slow building, piece by piece, distracted her from the diagnosis. Her treatment was successful, but she kept her love of Lego.
As MUGs president for the last two years, it’s up to O’Keefe to organise meetups for the Lego community in Melbourne.
“There’s always been this underground cult following of adult Lego fans,” she says with a generous laugh. What’s changed in the past few years has been the Lego themed movies and TV shows. “We noticed that the more exposure [Lego] gets, the more people come out,” she says with a generous laugh.
O’Keefe beams when she says the AFOL community is gendered equally. “We don’t have gender boundaries, and I love that. We’ve got these handsome burly men that are buying girls boxes left, right and center because they want the teal green [blocks]”.
When I ask about her own Lego collection, she coughs. “Do you want the real answer? Or the one I tell my husband?” She admits to having a seperate storage locker brimming with Lego.
“I tell my husband I have like two boxes.”
While O’Keefe’s husband supports her hobby, it’s a sensitive topic. Almost everyone admitted that their love of Lego put a strain on their relationships. The high cost of Lego is surely problematic.
Lego is a sore spot for Reynolds’ wife. He is only allowed two pieces of Lego outside of his room.
But his passion has also deepened his relationship with others. Reynold’s says that Lego is not something that his dad is into, “but he loves it, because I love it.” His dad was excited to watch Lego Masters so that they could talk to each other about it, to have something in common.
On Reynold’s TV cabinet, there is a small block of five lego minifigures. “It’s my family: this is me, this is my wife, and my three boys.”
Reynolds starts talking about his children. “Exhibiting [at Brickvention] is great, the kids get used to public speaking and crowds,” he says. Reynolds has three boys, two of whom are on the autism spectrum.
“My son has one of the coolest Star Wars collections you’ll see,” he says with pride. It really is a sight; glass cabinets and Ikea shelving filled with limited edition Star Wars Lego.
“Do you think you’re going to be a Lego fan when you get older?” Steve asks Liam.
“Yeah,” his sons says with a grin.
“Then I’ve done my job.”
