Shelley Howells: Lego plastic sure isn't past it

With a 7-year-old kid in the house it's no surprise that, despite assorted feeble star charts encouraging tidy habits (or possibly as a direct result of them), no matter where you step, sit or bathe you'll be doing it in the company of Lego: Lego bricks, Lego men, Lego mother-trapping contraptions, Lego pen-holders and yesterday, a Lego cemetery plot in the herb garden. Bless.

As if that's not enough, I've started tripping over the stuff online too.

Some of the most famous online Lego has to be the epic Star Wars Trilogy made entirely from the plastic bricks back in the 90s. Making the "films" took the dedicated creator more than 2500 hours, from 1992 to 1996, and helped spawn the passion for making the Lego and action-figure spoof and fan movies that have since become an online staple. Can't find a Lego man or woman who looks the part for your toy-peopled movie? Head over to the site of David J Oakes home.sprynet.com/~djoakes/legopag2.htm, who customises Lego figures to order. His gallery includes anyone from Xena and Gabrielle to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, loads of DC Comics characters and a Teletubby or two.

Or you can create yourself in Lego online ("picture yourself in plastic") at Reasonably Clever www.reasonablyclever.com, a reasonably clever site that also includes a gallery of Lego-inspired tarot cards.

Another lovely thing is The Lego Treasure Hunt, an online puzzle/adventure game built from the blocks. The idea is to help Lego pirate Jim on his quest to find hidden treasure by exploring, solving puzzles and meeting with other Lego characters. It is entirely as daft as it sounds but extremely addictive.

Pirate Jim is a wholesome lad, but there is a dark side to Lego online. Sensitive souls may prefer to avoid Blockdeath: A Museum of Horrors, a gallery of gruesome scenes, from torture devices and executions to domestic accidents, all made of Lego, all rotatable for a closer look at the action. It is sick, hilarious stuff - the familiar perky Lego-man grin starts to look like the leer of a moulded madman after flicking through a few of these.

Equally spooky is the amount of time, money and effort that some adults go to to play with children's toys.

Like the guy who built a full-size working harpsichord of Lego www.henrylim.org/Harpsichord.html; the bloke who built a working office desk www.ericharshbarger.org/lego/desk.html from 35,000 bricks; the one who gets his kicks from building mathematical models www.lipsons.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/mathlego.htm from Lego; the 20-year project to make a brick-shooting Lego machine gun www.silverlight.org/Cray/lego/machinegun.asp; whoever decided to scan 60s Lego ads from Swedish comic books www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Launchpad/4405/scans.htm and the Polish artist who, controversially, created fake Lego Sets of Nazi concentration camps.


Those wee lumps of plastic sure get around.

Now they are about to go where no one (flesh or plastic) has been before - to Mars, on the two Mars Exploration Rover spacecraft.

To make the unmanned mission more interesting and easy to follow for kids, Nasa and Lego came up with Astrobots Biff Starling and Sandy Moondust. Okay, so there aren't actual toys on board (they'd melt out there, we're told), just a picture of each on a silicone DVD, but they still manage to write weblogs and emails about their mission. A very engaging way to keep up with the Mars voyage.

Even more fun (assuming a: you have the patience to wait your turn, b: your computer isn't a lemon like the ancient iMac I'm using) is the opportunity to remotely drive a mini replica Lego Rover across Mars-like terrain, seeing where you're going through the Rover's web camera "eye".

Few of the above sites are officially sanctioned by the Lego company whose own site has lots of kid-friendly Shockwave games, many of which inspire good, old-fashioned offline play.

Frankly, after peering through a few dozen Lego-worshipping twisted pages, you'll never look at the once-seemingly-innocuous blocks and figures in quite the same way again. And that's without seeing any Lego porn (find it yourself, weirdo).

* Email Shelley Howells

http://www5b.biglobe.ne.jp/~mbsf/sworde.htm

www.actionflash.com/the_lego_treasure_hunt.html

www.blockdeath.com

users.erols.com/kennrice/lego-kz.htm.

redrovergoestomars.org/astrobots


redrovergoestomars.org/drive.html

www.lego.com