LEGO (23 page)

The children I expected to be on the plane are apparently all in the lobby of the LEGOLAND Hotel. As we approach the front desk to check in, I notice a few kids begging their parents to buy the sets that are piled in displays around the desk, while others are busy playing around the circular pits filled with DUPLO bricks.

LEGOLAND is only open for another hour, but I’m too excited to wait until tomorrow, and Kate agrees to use the first day of our two-day pass to go into the park. The hotel is connected to the park by an elevated walkway, and thus less than an hour after we’ve arrived in Denmark, we’re walking through the turnstiles of the amusement park just as 1.4 million people do every year.

 

 

LEGOLAND Billund initially was conceived of as a promotional tool in 1968.

“Legoland was created when growing throngs of tourists began to interfere with work at the LEGO factory,” wrote Robert D. Hershey Jr. in a 1977
New York Times
profile of the burgeoning company in Denmark.

The first shot at franchising LEGOLAND was not successful. A second park opened in 1973 in Sierksdorf, Germany, LEGO’s largest toy market. It closed only three years later due to a lack of attendance, and twenty years passed before the second LEGOLAND theme park was introduced in Windsor, England. Its success led to LEGOLAND California opening in 1999, and another attempt at the German market in 2002 with LEGOLAND Deutschland in Gunzburg. The parks have been run by Merlin Entertainments since 2005. The amusement park operator intends to open a fifth location in Dubai in 2011; a sixth, named LEGOLAND Florida, in Winter Haven, the same year; and LEGOLAND Malaysia in Iskandar in 2013.

Kate and I are slightly older than the target demographic of two to twelve.

“I wonder if we’re the only ones here without kids,” says Kate. I think we are. In fact, it seems that there a lot of kids who simply haven’t brought their parents. It hurts a bit because we’re still trying to have a baby, but the combination of excitement at being inside LEGOLAND and sleep deprivation morph those feelings into euphoria. We have enough time to walk around the park once, noting the location of Miniland and the rides we have to go on in the morning. Before I want to leave, we’re being hustled out by polite but firm park employees.

Plastic lamps filled with monochromatic LEGO bricks hang over the stairs that lead back to the hotel walkway from the park. I make Kate take several pictures, convinced we can recreate the effect in our house.

“We have to get LEGO everything,” I tell her, jumping from LEGO brick to brick on the patterned rug in the hotel lobby. She would rather have a copy of the LEGO mosaic Mona Lisa that hangs there. The hotel is actually under construction, but it’s still slightly strange to see eighteen-inch-tall LEGO figures mock-painting or repairing the building’s entrance. The scaled-up minifigures are cheerfully posed near the front door and front desk, leaving no doubt about the theme of the hotel. As we struggle to stay awake so we’ll adjust to the time change, children run up and down the hall eager to get to the free video-game kiosks with LEGO Indiana Jones.

Kate and I are expecting a bit more luxury for $400, but our room is spartanly Ikea. I try to convince her that our bed frame is made of LEGO, but she quickly figures out it’s more likely to be particleboard. I lend her my pajamas after she opens her suitcase and discovers that her contact lens solution has leaked onto her clothes. That night, we’ve been asleep for a few hours when I hear the click of the door opening. I open my eyes. The light from the hallway spills into the entryway, and I see a large shadow cut across the light. An intruder is in our room, and I’m not wearing pants.

“Get out!” I yell. The man’s response is an incoherent mumble, possibly in German. Who could get that drunk in the most family-friendly hotel I’ve ever stayed at? I debate getting out of bed, trying to decide if it would be more or less intimidating to the stranger to be confronted with a pantless adversary.

“Get out,” I repeat, dropping my tone an octave to use my camp counselor voice, but staying underneath the covers. I see the shadow begin to retreat. Kate wakes up and yells, “Get out!”

“Shut the door,” I command. The drunk mumbles—a decent impression of a Danish Rocky—and the door snicks closed.

In the morning, we go back to LEGOLAND. I keep looking around to see if any large guys pushing strollers are hungover, but nobody seems to be weaving. I hold hands with Kate as we walk toward the center of the park to get a look at LEGO Mount Rushmore, the first on my list of models I want to see. It’s built at a 1:12 scale, it is composed of 1.5 million bricks, and it sits outside the entrance of the Old West town known as Legoredo. With shipping, it would cost a cool $100,000 to buy that many bricks online. There is surreal, and then there is walking through a theme park in western Denmark while Kenny Roger’s “The Gambler” plays over the loudspeaker. We buy lunch at Billy’s Western.

I had asked Joe Meno for food recommendations in Billund. “Danish hamburgers are really odd,” he warned me via e-mail. “Pizza is different too, but not quite as bad as the burgers.”

If Danish hamburgers are odd, I wonder what Joe would think of what we do choose. A Fransk dog is a hot dog shoved inside a cored-out baguette filled with mustard or mayonnaise. They’re perfect for eating while walking. Unfortunately, they also fall prey to the law of diminishing returns, bringing a bit less satisfaction and a bit more indigestion with each subsequent one purchased.

We stop briefly at the Indian Trading Post, where a tall, fit white man wearing a Native American longshirt and headdress tries to sell tomahawks to the park guests while greeting them with a “How, How!” This is the America of 1855 as imagined by the America of 1955.

At times, it’s easy to forget that LEGO is a Danish company. Most of my friends are surprised to learn that LEGO bricks didn’t originate in the United States. But here at LEGOLAND, Kate and I notice some differences from the typical American theme park.

The most obvious is the Traffic School, where good behavior is the rule of the road. Kids earn a mock “driver’s license” for operating a small electric LEGO car according to the laws of the ride. The kids must obey traffic signs and fill their cars up at gas pumps at certain points. It’s unclear why this ride is fun; the whole thing seems designed for the children of uptight accountants.

A number of rides are also human-powered. Children hoist themselves up a rope to the top of a tower. Kate and I are both dangerously winded after a fire truck ride where we have to operate a hand pump, something like a seesaw device on a rail car.

The pirate boats evoke the atmosphere of Pirates of the Caribbean, except the six-passenger faux-wooden boat travels past scenes made entirely out of LEGO. Our knees touch the front of the safari cars as they wind on a track between LEGO giraffes and flamingos. The rides are very tame, meant for small children to enjoy. As a result, Kate convinces me to ride the Dragon, a mini roller coaster that screams around a single loop after a LEGO wizard utters a magic spell. It’s only the second roller coaster I’ve been on in my thirty years on earth. A week after I rode the first, a car flew off the track of that particular coaster, and that sealed the deal for me. Until now. Our photo from the Dragon at Billund shows me grimacing with my eyes shut. Thankfully the camera doesn’t have enough resolution to catch the few tears that streamed from my eyes. However, they might be captured nicely in a mosaic with 1 × 1 translucent tiles.

But we didn’t come to LEGOLAND for the rides; we’re here to see Miniland, the brick re-creation of famous cities and landmarks. This is where adult fans come first because it’s usually the best work of master model builders in the park. We spend three hours among the twenty million bricks.

“They have working locks,” says Kate, marveling at the canals and harbors of LEGO European cities. The boats and cars run on electric circuits or pulley systems. I love the details. It’s like a continuous game of
Where’s Waldo?
A top-hatted chimney sweep cleans out the chimney of a Victorian building, and a LEGO father stops to buy his daughter an ice cream in the park. The buildings are brought to life by these tiny scenes that capture moments in time with figures that don’t have faces. The bonsai-scale landscaping is nearly as impressive. A LEGO Miniland figure pushes a brick lawnmower among real flowers and trees that are proportionally correct.

It’s also exciting to discover parts and buildings in colors that have not been commercially available. Although the idea of Miniland and most large-scale models is that the model builders attempt to use the parts available to the public, sometimes they have access to parts in unique colors or batches that are no longer on the market. There are flesh- and brown-colored buildings in shades I wish I could buy. I settle for purchasing several pounds of minifigure accessories and translucent 1 × 2 pieces in the Pick A Brick section of the nearby gift shop.

 

 

After spending the entire day at LEGOLAND yesterday, I can’t wait to see where LEGO bricks are made. I’ve got a few loose minifig heads in my pocket as I walk from the hotel up Systemvej road toward LEGO headquarters. “Systemvej road” roughly translates to “System Road,” another sign that the town and company are as interlocked as the bricks they make.

“I’m here to see Jan Christiansen,” I tell the receptionist, pronouncing it “yan,” rather than my first instinct to try it like the second Brady Bunch sister. Thankfully, nearly everyone we encounter speaks almost flawless English.

“There are a number of Jan Christiansens,” she says. “Are you looking for the one in accounting?” Of course there are a lot of Jan Christiansens—both the first and last name are common in Denmark. This is quickly beginning to resemble a bad job interview.

“No, I’m a journalist and he’s part of media relations...”

“Oh, you mean
Jan
Christiansen, there’s only one of him,” says the receptionist, rhyming his first name with “pen.”

Jan comes out to greet me, and thankfully he is taller and skinnier than my seatmate on the plane. He introduces me to Aksel Krabbe Nielsen, the visitor manager, who will be guiding us around the production plant attached to the corporate headquarters. Aksel has a flat-top haircut and the glasses of a NASA employee from
Apollo 13.
Jan also explains that a photographer and a reporter from a newspaper in Hamburg, Germany, will be joining us on the tour. The factory is connected to the headquarters building via a short hallway that is just long enough to build anticipation.

“This is, um ... you have seen it before, Darth Vader’s spaceship, the Millennium Falcon?” asks Aksel at the beginning of our tour, pointing out LEGO’s most expensive model to date.

“That’s Han Solo’s ship, actually,” I can’t help but correct him.

“Oh, I see we have a real Star Wars expert here today,” he replies, laughing with the German newspaper employees.

I’m not an expert,
I want to say,
that’s something that everybody in the United States knows.
But instead, I just smile and laugh along with them. They are making Star Wars minifigures in the plant today—clone troopers—at a rate the Kaminoans could only dream of: thirty-six thousand per minute.

“Do you have the Amy Winehouse LEGO people here?” asks the German reporter. LEGO recently has created graphics of pop culture figures for publicity, but never actually produced the minifigs. It was briefly a strong topic of debate on the adult fan forums. I’m about to correct her, when Jan explains that the minifigs were never really made.

“So, do you have them here?” the reporter asks again. Behind her a row of LEGO minifig heads are rolling down a conveyor belt into a box. I can’t believe she’s worried about Amy Winehouse when we’re in the middle of the place that makes LEGO minifigures.

I find myself initially stumped for questions, too stunned by my surroundings to interrupt Aksel’s standard patter. So I take pictures and awkwardly work the buttons on my handheld video camera. I keep waiting for somebody to stop me from capturing the inner workings of the factory, but nobody does. I inadvertently appear in a lot of the German photographer’s shots, but I feel rewarded when I give him a tip on how to avoid getting glare from LEGO pieces.

Minifigures are among the most complicated and expensive pieces made by LEGO, requiring up to six passes through a stamper to imprint faces or designs on torsos. The torsos are spun around a slightly vibrating circular container and weighed for the correct tolerances before a machine inserts the arms. The hands are then added to the arms.

“We don’t mix bricks and minifigs,” says Aksel as we walk from the production side of the plant to where they assemble the sets. He’s a LEGO diehard, having worked at the company for twenty-five years and four months, according to his calculations. He started as a cowboy in LEGOLAND.

It is Aksel who introduces new employees to the culture of LEGO. I can see why as he is proud of the toys they make, but I’m willing to bet he doesn’t build at home (he doesn’t). He has the perfect mix of investment and detachment that makes for a lifelong employee. It also means that he is nonchalant about the vast size of the factory that produces tiny bricks.

Steam issues from giant pipes running along the ceiling designed to keep the humidity at a proper level in the factory. Black LEGO shovels fall into black bins. Bricks are put into red and blue bins. And everything runs on bar codes. LEGO produces 19 billion elements a year, 2.16 million elements per hour (about fifty pieces in the time it took you to read that sentence).

The parts become sets on the packaging lines. The pieces are separated and then counted with an optical sensor as they are inserted into small boxes. The boxes are continually weighed, and an alarm sounds if the weight isn’t correct. That alarm alerts an employee, who does a visual inspection to figure out what parts are missing or need to be added according to the instructions for a given set.