LEGO Masters week 8 exit interview
Posted by MeganL,
We're heading into the second half of the season, as we're now down to six team. Some great teams have had to leave, but I'm looking forward to what comes next. If you haven't watched the episode, it's available on streaming (in the US), so you have a chance to watch it before reading about the recap and the interview with the exiting team after the break.
This week's challenge was a puppet show! Each team had to build their own puppet, and then partner with another team to put on a show. Additionally, each puppet had to have a special skill to show off to the judges.
This was the first episode this season to feature a live guest in the form of Billy, a puppet of Will Arnett. As we learned in the preseason interview with Will, the puppeteer for Billy had a terrific puppeteering resume.
There were some great puppets, but Mark and Steven took home the win this week for their build of Bernie, the Burnt Out Dragon. Mark has posted on Facebook that the inspiration for this build was the fact that the brothers were feeling a little burnt out doing so much building in such a short period of time. You'd never know it from their build.
Unfortunately, one team (and their puppet) had to go home, and this week it was the sibling team of Bryan and Lauren and their adorable puppy puppet. They are the first team to go home who won a challenge (Week 2, Hero Shot).
It seemed that there were requirements for the builds and performance that weren’t shown on the episode. Can you give us some details around that?
Bryan: Yeah, that's, that's a great question. Compared to the windmill challenge which had so many technical requirements, this challenge had very few. It really was just build a puppet that had at least one moving part. There were no size requirements, which is why you saw the variance in the size of the puppets. It was very much just build a puppet and make something move. But there was a lot that went into the performing aspects. We were each given a script that we had to fully memorize and perform. The script was also taped behind the stage there if we had the time to look, which nobody did….
Lauren: We were busy doing the show...
Bryan: So we all memorized the script fully. In the script, there were both scripted moments which you hear, the one scripted moment you really hear is with Caleb and Jacob and Mark and Steven the whole thing about VIP and all of that, that was part of the script. Then there were moments in the script that allowed for improv, and in those improv moments, you got to show off your special skill. That was also recommended by the judges - your puppet should have some sort of special skill that it could do. So for our puppet, it could play fetch. So we created a little tennis ball...
Lauren: That was the bedazzled, bejewelled tennis ball to see the princess.
Bryan: So that was really where we got to have fun with it. We got to improvise a little bit and do our own thing, but other than that we were really just following the script and then at the end, both of our puppets could come together….
Lauren: And do the show together. So what we ended up doing was that we sang a song with Natalie Michelle. We got to have a really close relationship with Natalie and Michelle throughout this experience. We wrote a song together backstage, so we're trying to figure out lyrics that we could do that would sound good, and we wanted to end it with teaching people that the plural of LEGO is LEGO. So that was fun. We were singing it backstage.
Bryan: Natalie has a musical background and I play piano so we were both going back and forth with musical ideas. Lauren used to do theatre. It just felt like the right thing to do.
Lauren: We had the most fun with it.
What was it like interacting with Billy the puppet on set?
Lauren: It was amazing!
Bryan: We loved Billy!
Lauren: This episode was the most fun we had during a build challenge. There was just such a fun air to the room because there was so such laughter going to - Billy was hilarious and Will had the best rapport. We had a great time when they came to our table.
Bryan: I don't think they covered it in the episode, but the puppeteer for Billy was the puppeteer for Kermit, so he's a big deal.
Lauren: He's a legend! He was so nice and so fun. He really wanted to meet us and know about the builds. I think he and Will had an absolute blast together.
Bryan: We've never seen Will having so much fun. Will is doing improv all the time, and none of us have done improv, so we're all just trying to play along and make it work. But this was Will getting to do improv with someone who does improv, so he was really in his zone.
Lauren: They were going a lot of improv with us - they were trying to one-up each other with who could take us out to something fancy: 'I'll take you guys out for coffee,' 'I'll take you out to dinner,' 'I'm going to take you to a five-star resort,' and eventually Will walked off.
Bryan: It was who could be the best host.
Lauren: I was just crying from laughing. It was just such a great time on set with them and we were so excited. We had a guest on the show, which we didn't know at the beginning if it was going to happen or not.
Bryan: It just had that buzzy energy that I imagine they had in Season 1 with the guests on set. We didn't actually have any of the guests in the episodes before this came on set, so to have this guest was really exciting.
What was it like to work with Brickmasters Amy and Jamie?
Bryan: They were so instrumental in guiding our build process. They spoke to us for every challenge right and only some interactions get shown. But every single challenge, they came to us with really valuable advice for how to tighten our stories, how to change our builds. For example, in the first challenge, Jamie told us to add some peril for our prince character hanging off the ledge, so we added these spiky brambles around the base. For the hate challenge they talked to us about how to pose the Phoenix to make it more striking. They were always offering really valuable guidance not only a storytelling perspective but also how to make your build really fit the challenge.
Lauren: They were really great, and they have so much wisdom, and they really do want to help you. They are there to try and make you build the best thing you can.
Bryan: I just love seeing Jamie just like nerd out of on details
Lauren: He freaked out in first episode with Bryan, when he saw our prince, rotating, obviously moving, and he said, I honestly don't know how you did that.
Bryan: That was such a cool moment. Jamie noticed something and said, “I have never seen that before” and so it was really cool to get that feedback.
Lauren: You were awesome.
What are some of the details of your builds that weren’t seen on TV?
Bryan: In episode one, that was our sibling storytime build where we built a huge Rapunzel tower. But really the core of that build was that it all started with the little minifigure scene in the bottom corner of the build that didn't really get shown. That the minifigure scene was of our mom reading us a bedtime story. Then that story is coming to life out of this giant story book on the float. So it's like we're hearing this story as little minifigure kids and then the story is coming to life.
Lauren: You actually see the little minifig mom holding a little blue book, and that was supposed to connect into the blue book that we built, to have the story come to life. It was a tribute to our parents helping us be creative by telling us stories. That whole story wasn't shown in the episode and it was something that was really meaningful to us.
Bryan: In episode three, that was so fun. We had a story about our birthday cakes. It was the tower earthquake episode. We are big storytellers, and we wanted a reason for why we were building a big cake. it couldn't just be that we're building a big cake that shakes, there had to be a story. So we created a story about Georgina the giant and so every year the royal bakers make an extremely amazing big cake for her every year. She's so excited that she comes bounding in, and the cake topples over because of all the shaking. So the royal bakers wanted to make the cake that can withstand Georgina's excitement and so that's why it's shaking. And the royal chefs, prepare the cake with all of Georgina's favourites, one of which includes human, aka minifigure, sprinkles all attached to the side.
Lauren: We love fantasy, so we were thinking of the land of giants. To have this giant Princess get all her little human mini sprinkles I thought they would all be scared. I spent quite a bit of time digging in those minifigure bins to find every terrified face, and it took quite some time to find every one. Some of them had personality, some were taken from the beach and so they have a crab and a lobster with their hands.
Bryan: For our derby car which was another built more focused on strength, the stories of the builds didn't quite make their way into the episode. We built “Beware the Bull”, and the story there is that this bull has stolen the matador's cape and is wearing it into the arena. So that cape that's flying off the back of the build is stolen from the matador and it has all the intricate gold stylings.
Were there any fun or memorable moments that didn't make it into the show?
Bryan: The big one that we mentioned before was when Will called our mom, that was so fun for us. He brought out Lauren's phone...
Lauren: ...and I called our mom and I remember I wasn't sure if she would pick up or not, but she did and I said, 'Hi mom, you're on LEGO Masters, here's Will!' And I just handed him the phone.
Bryan: And Will just took the phone and said, 'Hi Margie!'
Lauren: From that point on, that was his bit with us, which sadly got cut. He would be acting like he was part of our family and asking how Margie is.
Bryan: He'd be like, 'I'm so proud of you, your mom is proud of you.' It was his bit with us for the entire rest of the time we were on the show.
Lauren: We were heartbroken that it didn't make it in, but we have our memories of it!
Bryan: Will and I had this running gag too about me being in a blazer, and how we were both in blazers, and I was 'Blazer Ryan.'
Lauren: Bryan doesn't wear blazers.
Bryan: Will caught on to that very quickly and continued to mess with me about it. One time I took the blazer off on camera and Will was like, 'No! No! Put it back on! We can't look at that!'
Lauren: We always had a blast with Will, there was always so much laughter, he was so funny. I know there was one time in our last episode when we were partnered with Natalie and Michelle and Will was trying to get us to practice with our puppets together and said, 'Well aren't you all friends in real life?' And I said, 'Yeah, the four of us have a group chat, and we've gotten real close, we talk all the time.' And he said, 'Are you serious? I'm really touched by that.'
Bryan: And we are to this day, we're so close with all of our fellow contestants. We made some really, really strong friendships on this show.
Lauren: All twenty-four of us still talk every day.
Do you have any disagreements on what colour schemes to use?
Bryan: Colour is something we think a lot about in every challenge. We want to have bright bold colours that are contrasting and that stand out. The only challenge where we kind of ran into trouble with our usual colour chemistry was in the turbine challenge. In that challenge we had this concept that we would build something where the characters would really be allowed to pop. We would have these bright coloured characters and a bright colour turbine. And that would kind of speak for itself but it was built on grey rocks. We got some guidance from the Brickmasters that they wanted to see a really bright colourful world. We had to adjust our plan and we ended up making these colourful kelp forests. That wasn't in our original plan so we struggled with adapting and figuring out how to work more colour in when we already had our colours planned.
Lauren: I spent a good five hours building some rocks, so we considered whether to ditch the rocks, but we decided not to, to make it realistic.
What did you want to get out of being on LEGO Masters?
Bryan: We are storytellers. That is such a foundational part of what we want to do, what we want to do with Lego, and what we want to do with our lives. We love telling stories and bringing these imaginative colourful worlds to life. With the unlimited opportunities of 5 million bricks in the brick pit it was the perfect chance to tell as many stories as we possibly could in the time that we got on LEGO Masters. That was really our mission: we’re storytellers. So, even if it was a technical challenge, even if it was a strength challenge, we tried our best to put as much story as we possibly could into every single build. That's something that we're hoping can last, and hopefully it was enjoyable for people who watch the show.
You were known for having a lot of small details. How did you find all the pieces you need with the time constraints?
Lauren: A lot of running back and forth. (laughs) Sometimes as well asking other contestants if they know where something is. Likewise they would ask us if we knew where something is. Everyone was very helpful, but I would say it was a lot of just getting used to where pieces were, and a lot of trial and error. It's interesting to think about now, to put myself back in that brick pit. I can actually picture where different things were. We tried to have a lot of creative parts usage. In the second build, when I was working on that lily pad flower I really tried to be inspired by what I was seeing in the brick pit, and to grab those pieces and then to just build it with what I found. Sometimes we would get inspired by bricks, we would actually find in the brick pit to use in our builds because there were so many.
Bryan: I think there are two approaches that you could take to something like this. You stick to your guns, you go right to the bricks that you know are there, you're not searching, you just know exactly what you're looking for, so we did that a lot. I love to sculpt and I'm very comfortable with traditional bricks and sculpting round curved shapes. So if we were in a pinch and we needed to create something that was curved or rounded, I knew that was a go to. But then there were other times, like building the under the sea world, where it's like Lauren said, we would just go to the brick pit, and look around. You just find pieces that work. It's really two strategies, but it depends on how much of a time crunch you’re in and what you're most comfortable with.
Lauren: In episode one we were getting used to the brick pit. I remember we couldn't find pieces that we needed. So in the end to attach our book on a diagonal, we ended up having to use little jumper plates very strategically placed so that the book would sit diagonally.
If you had had two extra hours on any challenge, which build would have benefited the most?
Bryan: The hanging brick, definitely. That is by far the one we were the most strapped for time. We had this idea and we were really excited to execute it. It ended up taking much longer than we thought to create that fluffy cloud design. It took a long time, and we didn't anticipate it. So that cut into everything else. I made sure I worked on those rainbow things along the side and made sure I had time for that, but other than that, we had to let some things fall through the cracks. We would have smoothed out some of the edges around the cloud on the bottom. Our tower broke and we didn’t have time to rebuild it, so our crystal palace would have been much taller. Plus I would have done some more work on the characters.
If you could give advice to your past self, what would you tell yourself going into LEGO Masters?
Bryan: Get really good at Technic. Every single challenge. Neither of us are Technic builders. That’s just not in our wheelhouse. We like to build things that are very aesthetically pleasing, and the function is kind of secondary. That was not the vibe for season two necessarily. It was very much a Technic build centered thing for the episodes that we got to experience. Every episode we ran straight for the Technic bin and were figuring it out. I was learning how a lot of the Technic connections even worked to begin with. I was finding parts I’d never seen before. That would have been the advice.
Lauren: Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty accurate. But I’ve got to give it to Bryan, actually. One other thing that didn’t make the final cut of the show was during the memory build. We actually got second place for the Lamborghini, which they didn’t show, and Bryan really did that well. I was really not very helpful. I was stressed out with building that car. Bryan, who is also not a Technic builder, was like “we still have to do it, so let’s do it!” and I was like: “I can’t!” So, that’s another thing I would tell myself. Just go for it, which we did. But remind yourself that you can do this, you’re creative, you can keep moving forward even when you feel stumped.
Bryan: That’s great advice to any LEGO Masters contestants. Whatever you’re doing, just commit to it and go all in. It’s like what Will was saying to Caleb and Jacob in this last episode, whatever you’re going to do with your story, just commit. I think LEGO Masters encourages that as well. You just really have to go all in on either creating your idea or selling your idea. If it’s something you are not sure about, you just have to commit.
What did this experience mean to you to be able to do it together?
Bryan: It was special. Lauren and I have been building together for a really long time. To see what we could do when we were pushed to our absolute limits, both endurance and in our building ability, doing these crazy challenges we could never have imagined. Lauren rose to the occasion so amazingly.
Lauren: It's a really extreme test. It's building on new levels and new ways we never have before. There’s such extreme pressure. It's something that we're always going to remember for our whole lives. We went on this crazy adventure and built these things we can be so proud of.
Bryan: To be there with family, with people that you feel so close to, and you're so comfortable with is special. We have this telepathy where we know what the other person is thinking. We had a moment on set where Will called our mom. That was so great because she got to talk about our interaction with Will. He was asking her “What do you do when they're acting out?”, and he asked who her favourite child was. We're a Lego family and we go to LEGOland and we all love it. To have this experience with Lauren, and to have that moment with our mom. It felt like a culmination of this lifetime of being a LEGO fan, and loving this creative outlet for so long.
Lauren: We hope it inspires other families to do the same and build together, and I think it was a really great experience.
Has building under pressure for the show changed your feeling toward LEGO?
Bryan: We're still building. I've been doing a lot of MOCs as well having fun with all the builds for every show to relive some of that. I have yet to delve into a big MOC. There's something where it feels almost a little bit too close after the show. Having to do these epic projects every single week, right now I can only wrap my head around small.
Lauren: It's definitely a bit of anxiety right now over building something really big because it puts you back into that world of just hype, stress and time pressure. We were used to building on a smaller scale, because Lego is expensive. It’s hard to build on such a big scale on your own. Most of these challenges that we did on the show was the first time we've ever built that scale. It’s a whole new mind space and just having to figure out how things are,
Bryan: We were joking on the set that we couldn’t remember the last time we used a two by four because of the type of small stuff that we typically do. But in LEGO Masters that is it - you use it for everything.
What is your LEGO Story? Did you have any favorite themes growing up, or did you go through a dark age?
Bryan: LEGO started for me when I was about three years old. I got a little town Minifigure set from my dad. It was the best thing I had ever seen. I lost one of the minifigures, and it was the first tantrum I ever threw.
Lauren: That’s a story that gets told a lot. It’s memorable [laughs].
Bryan: That was my start with LEGO. I started building my own stuff, probably by age four. Then when Lauren was born, and she started building with bricks, I brought her into the hobby. I grew up with Johnny Thunder. I dressed up as Johnny Thunder as a kid. I literally wore a cardboard box, Styrofoam pants, and a painted lipstick moustache.
Lauren: He won a competition at LEGOland for wearing that costume [laughs].
Bryan: Johnny Thunder was a big deal. That was probably the earliest theme that I remember being hooked on. Then, I was very much of the generation when the first licensed sets came out. So, when Star Wars landed, when Harry Potter landed, I was a young kid. That was just perfect. I got every single one and was just off to the races. The dark ages didn’t really happen. I went through a phase where I got really into this platform called Little Big Planet on PS3, which is almost like LEGO building. I was really into that, and it was more my thing in middle school than LEGO. But, once that had its time, it was back to LEGO.
Lauren: Then they did the Lord of the Rings line.
Bryan: I never really had a dark age, but when they brought that Lord of the Rings line out, I was like “this is the coolest thing that has ever happened.”
Lauren: I was three when I got my first set. That was a little Belville set. Belville is a discontinued line for LEGO. It was geared more towards girls at the time. There are a lot of fairy tale themed sets, and I absolutely loved those. I had them and continued to get those sets up until the time they were discontinued. Absolutely adored them. They’re my favourite, heartbroken that they’re gone.
Bryan: We built a lot of those together too, a lot of those Belville sets.
Lauren: Yeah, we built a lot together. We also spent so much time playing all the LEGO video games together. That was a big thing we would do. LEGO Star Wars, LEGO Indiana Jones, LEGO Batman, LEGO Lord of the Rings. We’ve grown up going to LEGOland a lot as well. We’re about a 45-minute drive from there. So, a lot of spending time in a LEGO community with our family and each other.
Bryan: We’d see the builds at LEGOland and go home and try to recreate them, especially those Miniland figures. If you’re familiar with those at LEGOland, they are very popular online too.
Lauren: There used to be a workshop in the back and Bryan had some of his things displayed there. As kids, you could build and have your builds displayed. So much of our childhood together had to do with LEGO.
If you could have designed a challenge for the show that played to your strengths, what would that have looked like?
Bryan: We know for sure that it would have been a storytelling challenge. When watching season one, a lot of the challenges would have played to our strengths. That movie genre challenge? Oh my goodness, we loved that. In this season, one of our favourite challenges was the Hero Shot challenge, which was movie related, tell a story, you know? When we get to wrap our hands around something and get into that storytelling mode, that’s when we thrive. If we got to do that movie genre challenge from season one, and we got to meet the directors of the LEGO Movie, I probably would have fainted. That would have been really cool. In watching season one, we saw a lot of ourselves and the types of things we like to build. Season two had some of that, but also a lot of technical stuff.
Lauren: It’s so different. A lot more technical challenges, which we weren’t anticipating. We were anticipating things much more similar to season one. Season two is a whole different ball game.
Bryan: A whole different thing. We did storytelling where we could.
Lauren: Yes, exactly, we tried to bring it into everything.
What is next for you both on LEGO journeys?
Bryan: I feel like collectively, we are both new to the convention scene and the expo scene and we are so excited to get to be a part of it. That just seems like an awesome world that we really want to explore. We're in California, so we're really excited for BricksLA coming up. We're just going to try to get to as many as we can and meet fellow AFOLs and get into the community. We have our community of friends from the show that we can attend with, and it seems like something that's the next step for us in our LEGO journey.
Lauren: It's going to be really exciting - it's going to be so fun to reconnect with all of our friends from the show and to meet so many other incredible builders. It's going to be a blast. Besides that, we actually headed to LEGOLAND soon, which will be fun! But yeah, I think conventions are going to be the biggest thing.
Bryan: And with those conventions I'm going to have to start building big again - I'm going to have to build some awesome stuff to show there. So we'll be bringing it!
This week's final builds:
31 likes
30 comments on this article
In the first season, with two LEGO employees who know better standing right there saying not a word, Will guffed it and said that the plural of LEGO is LEGO. In the second season, they corrected that error and stated that the word “LEGO” should be treated as an adjective, not a noun (hence no plural form at all). And then halfway through the season, the contestants dive right back into getting it wrong. *sigh* They really need to start coaching the contestants on this before shooting a single frame of footage.
Gotta say I am still a bit confused as to why they were the ones to be eliminated.
@MeganL Please look at this article in dark mode, there seems to be some formatting and inline styling on some of the paragraphs. Great interview, though.
@PurpleDave said:
"In the first season, with two LEGO employees who know better standing right there saying not a word, Will guffed it and said that the plural of LEGO is LEGO. In the second season, they corrected that error and stated that the word “LEGO” should be treated as an adjective, not a noun (hence no plural form at all). And then halfway through the season, the contestants dive right back into getting it wrong. *sigh* They really need to start coaching the contestants on this before shooting a single frame of footage."
Call me crazy, who cares?
@darthnorman said:
" @MeganL Please look at this article in dark mode, there seems to be some formatting and inline styling on some of the paragraphs. Great interview, though."
Yes I am on dark mode and I have the same problem.
@gorf43 said:
" @darthnorman said:
" @MeganL Please look at this article in dark mode, there seems to be some formatting and inline styling on some of the paragraphs. Great interview, though."
Yes I am on dark mode and I have the same problem. "
Me too.
@MHecht:
The LEGO Company cares, for the same reason Bayer should have cared about aspirin, and Xerox should have cared about their own name. All three words have had trademarks filed with the USPTO, but Bayer and Xerox had theirs revoked for failing to defend them to the court’s satisfaction. Someone involved in the production of this show cares, or they wouldn’t have addressed it both seasons. Someone overseeing this show on behalf of The LEGO Company cares, or they wouldn’t have changed their stance between seasons. This team of contestants care, or they wouldn’t have written it into their song.
I actually don’t care what you, or anyone else, choose to call it. I do care when people try correcting other people and get it wrong themselves. If you’re going to correct someone, make sure you got it right first.
I am surprised they were let go that week. Maybe they didn't showcase all the movement during the performance like they said, but they moved way more than the DJ!
I guess I'm not a good judge because I don't see all of what they are seeing, but what they show on camera there is no way they should have gone home.
But they seem really positive about the experience, so I'm sure they will be fine in the end.
Keep up the great building y'all!
I guess I missed that about it being used as an adjective. Adjectives describe things, so I should start saying "the sky is really LEGO right now."
Either way, I don't care. I've called them LEGOs all my life and I'll continue to do so. Life is too short to worry about calling a toy the wrong name...
@PurpleDave - I think it would be extremely difficult for producers to prevent contestants from using 'LEGO' as a noun when speaking, especially because they presumably want the contestants to feel as relaxed as possible throughout filming.
@CapnRex101 said:
" @PurpleDave - I think it would be extremely difficult for producers to prevent contestants from using 'LEGO' as a noun when speaking, especially because they presumably want the contestants to feel as relaxed as possible throughout filming."
This was my thinking as well. The pronunciation of the word is ultimately trivial to everything, and correcting people on how to say it would just come off as stuck-up and demanding. At the end of the day the mispronunciation won’t affect ratings, sales, or general opinion of Lego.
PurpleDave is correct and I think people are misinterpreting what he is saying. Speaking as a trademark lawyer, all trademarks are supposed to be adjectives that qualify generic nouns, because the function of a trademark is to identify the source of goods rather than the product itself. So you are supposed to say LEGO brick and not just LEGO. Otherwise if the word LEGO becomes synonymous with toy brick then the trademark is in danger of becoming genericized, as was pointed out above.
It's not a coincidence that the show is called "LEGO [adj] Masters [noun]" or that the movie was called "The LEGO [adj] Movie [noun]" etc. These titles were all greenlit by trademark lawyers, for better or worse (better for the brand, worse for creativity).
By the way, this is also why LEGO is capitalized. Proper trademark use best practices always advise capitalizing brand names so they stand out as trademarks.
Of course, as PurpleDave said, no one outside of TLG or their affiliates should care about this one bit. It's not any of our jobs to maintain the strength of the LEGO trademarks. If they want us to do that, they can pay us. The only reason I even capitalize LEGO is sheer force of habit from doing trademark maintenance work for the last 15 years. I really should stop capitalizing it since again, not my or your or anyone's job outside of TLG.
But obviously the IP subdivision of LEGO's legal department does care and is paid to care, and given how careful TLG is with its trademark usage (I am sure they have an in-house guide to proper usage of the LEGO name just like most big corporations do), they should have gotten this right. I don't really buy that they let this go for the sake of verisimilitude -- this is a "reality" show, which means there's like 10 takes of everything and everyone is basically reading a script. And you can ADR anything that's not perfect.
@illennium , I think it already has become generalized. I can’t tell you the number of people that equate a building brick of any kind with LEGO, and don’t fully understand what the word LEGO means. I also don’t know how many people noticed or cared outside of the LEGO group and fans like us. I’m certainly not trying to argue, and I 100% understand what you and @PurpleDave are saying. I just think getting the contestants to say it and change their ways isn’t worth the effort, and it would take away from the spirit of the competition.
Back on topic, I liked this group, they had good builds and I don’t think their puppet was the weakest build this past week.
In regards to it being a reality show and having a script, I’ve gotten the feeling that the whole build part isn’t scripted, and the contestants are just out there building and the hosts go around interacting at times. They may have scripts as far as what they should be trying to say and do, but for the most part I don’t think there’s any script for the contestants and what they say or do.
I've never seen "LEGOland" written with that capitalization before. (Personally, I write it "Legoland"...but I also write "Lego" or "Realtor" and only capitalize the first letter on those trademarks because marketing-demands-be-damned. I learned it as "Lego" in the early 1980s catalogs before their marketing started demanding it be fully capitalized.)
@Sethro3:
As I said, I don’t really fret about what other people choose to call them, but every so often I stumble across a tiff between North America (or at least the US, since I don’t know which side of things Canada or Mexico fall on) arguing that the plural is “legos”, and Europe saying it’s “lego” instead. It’s like walking down the street and hearing two people in a heated discussion over whether the sky is polka-dotted or plaid.
@CapnRex101:
True, you can’t exactly have someone with a whip or paddle standing by every table waiting to punish the contestants when they get it wrong. But they sent two senior employees to judge the first season, and Will threw out that line during a segment when the clock was not running and they were standing right beside him. Absolutely the Brick Masters could have asked them to pause the cameras, explain the issue, and reshoot that segment with Will saying it correctly. Or they could have corrected him on camera, and put it in the episode. They didn’t (or the production staff blew them off, or it got cut from the final edit), but you know there were at least a few BTS conversations about how that managed to get on the air. And nobody addressed it for the next nine episodes.
S2 rolls around, and it once again gets brought up in the premiere. Either Will discovered his error during the off-season, or someone from TLC with the ability to shut down the show leaned on the producers to get it right, and this time they did. And the contestants were all there when he said it. But the contestants aren’t reading from a script (well, except this time, but they wrote part of the script themselves). And there have probably already been at least a couple conversations about this instance.
It’s too late to do anything about S2, since it’s all recorded at this point, but I would be surprised if they don’t have a quick conversation with them, off-camera, about their preferred use of the trademark. I once interviewed Nathan Furst (son of Stephen Furst, who played Flounder in Animal House) about his score for the first Bionicle movie. Even though the theatrical release got cancelled and it went straight to DVD, they’d hired a PR firm, and I was required to submit my interview to them for approval. There were no objections to the content, but I got seriously schooled on all the ways I was getting the trademark usage wrong.
I doubt they’d cancel the show outright over a few slips of trademark usage, but if they perceive it to be a recurring problem, they’ll probably throw people at it until it’s not.
@illennium:
There’s at least one glaring exception that comes to mind. I can’t think of a single automaker that does not use their brand name as a noun. Many of them even turned them into jingles. Somehow they continue to get away with it and nobody challenges their trademarks (at least not successfully).
As for how the show is run, not all reality shows are the same. Some have live episodes, where they have zero opportunity to reshoot anything. Any actual contest within the series is subject to laws regarding fair competitions, thanks to the quiz show scandals from last century. This show has an intro, a timed portion, and a judging phase. They can reshoot the start and end of every episode if they need a better take, but you can’t reset the clock to cover reshoots. You can’t monopolize one team’s time so they have no chance of completing the build challenge. They spend hours filming each build session from multiple angles in case something game-changing happens, and they have to edit that all down to a few minutes of airtime. If something doesn’t work, you find something else that does. But especially with the challenges where the build has to be destroyed, there’s probably no fair way to restage a scenario for an alternate take.
But it’s absolutely a fair assumption. My LUG helped out with an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition at their request (we never got mentioned, I think I was the only one who appeared on camera but in an unrelated room, and the “talent” took credit for all our work). Until every last bit of work was done inside the house, and all the workers who built that house in six days were clear, the family was not allowed inside. They weren’t even allowed out of the limo. So the limo kept circling the block, and the crowd of fans kept reacting as cued from off camera. They probably had 1-2 dozen takes of the limo pulling up that they could pick from (options are always good in case someone flashes an offensive hand sign, or does something embarrassing).
@PurpleDave said:
"There’s at least one glaring exception that comes to mind. I can’t think of a single automaker that does not use their brand name as a noun. Many of them even turned them into jingles. Somehow they continue to get away with it and nobody challenges their trademarks (at least not successfully)."
It's because no single car company controls enough of the market to the point where consumers equate, e.g. "Toyota" with "car." There's a whole bunch of trademark best practices; no single one is dispositive and in a diversified market you can largely ignore them because it's honestly quite difficult for a trademark to become genericized. But when you control the market to the extent that, e.g., Xerox did, then you are in trouble and you're going to get a lot of "I told you so's" from your legal department. If we start to see additional market consolidation in the automobile market then this will come up more.
Same with video games and shoes (and many other examples). Microsoft is more than happy to tell you to get an Xbox, Sony will tell you to buy a Playstation, and Nike will even pluralize their own brand name and tell you to buy a pair of Nikes. They're all safe for now because there's competition in those marketplaces.
Whereas TLG has largely cornered the market for plastic building bricks or whatever generic term they use. The average consumer has never heard of Mega Construx or other brands. When they see a toy brick they instantly think LEGO. So TLG has to care about these things more than most brands.
EDIT: Typing this made me wonder -- has TLG ever publicly stated what they perceive their competition to be? I imagine they think it's things like video games (hence their video game division and their foray into AR) and Netflix. And then to some degree it's probably toys in general since once the kid is in the toy section of Target or Walmart you still need them to buy the LEGO and not a toy car or doll. But if I had to guess, I would say that Minecraft and Roblox are probably their actual biggest competition.
@monkyby87:
Funny thing is, it’s not the degree of success that keeps your trademark from being revoked. It’s the honest effort taken to defend it. They have no effective way to prevent a LUG (especially one that’s not a legal entity) from abiding by their trademark usage, but it’s one of the prerequisites to be admitted to their RLUG program, which is the only way to gain access to stuff like LUGBulk and AFOL Appreciation Day (aka LUG Day). My own LUG had to abandon our LUG logo because it featured a minifig, which is one of the trademarks they are defending more aggressively these days. I think we also had to tweak the text on our LTC logo. If we threw a fit and refused, we could have kissed RLUG status goodbye. And they might have sent us a Cease & Desist over the minifig in our old LUG logo.
The carrot works pretty well for LUGs, but other cases have required their legal team to involve themselves more forcefully. They do so, and can then demonstrate that they put forth honest effort to defend their trademarks. The instances when they have to take legal action probably bolster their trademark status more than having every AFOL abide strictly by their wishes, since “nobody uses them incorrectly” is a pretty poor form of defense.
@PDelahanty:
No, indeed you haven’t. But you have seen it written “LEGOLAND”, because that word is also trademarked.
@illennium:
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. I’d long wondered about that, but not enough to chase down a lawyer.
The common term applied to LEGO products is “construction toy”, which encompasses everything from Lincoln Logs to Technic. Within the market, I suspect their main competitors are K’Nex and Mega Brands. In a more general sense, yes, they absolutely see stuff like video games as being the main source of erosion within their market. It’s no benefit to corner 90% of your market if your market gets overrun by something completely unrelated. 90% of 1% is barely enough to throw a decent Going Out Of Business party. Ironically, they’re still panicking about market erosion when they actually managed, with a single toy line, to topple Hasbro off the Biggest Toymaker throne. That effectively means the LEGO System is (was?) bigger than Barbie, bigger than Hot Wheels, and bigger than Transformers. If it wasn’t, they never would have reached the top spot.
A close-up of the Princess puppet is missing from the photos at the bottom of the article (at least for me on my iPad).
Seeing close-up still photos of all the puppets really helps me to understand why Mark & Steven won this challenge — most of the puppets are quite blocky and designed to look good from the front rather than all sides. Mark & Steven’s dragon is sculpted much more beautifully than the rest, and it also had enough interesting movement to keep it ahead of the Musketeer and the DJ (in my opinion).
Disclaimer: I’ve met Mark multiple times (I shop at the store where he works), and I’m rooting for him and Steven. But after watching last week’s episode, I would have voted for the Musketeer.
I love these post-game interviews, because even though they “lost,” they are all fantastic builders with different strengths and weaknesses. I love reading what they have to say about the experience.
Getting off the legal topic for a bit, it is rather disconcerting to find out there are so many untelevised requirements. I suspect it may be meant to trim the amount of time they have to spend on each model, but it means there may be eliminations that hinged on some minor requirement that we weren’t even privy to. Last season’s bridge challenge was confusing enough, where the general consensus of the contestants was that the winning bridge looked best in person, but the runner-up read better on TV.
Now, they may not have stated a size restriction, but they did make it known that the teams would have to perform with the puppet, and they cautioned more than one team about building something too heavy to hold and operate. I wonder if they were expecting everyone to build something like Pepe the King Prawn or Kermit’s nephew Robin, rather than Fozzie or the Swedish Chef.
Regarding all the unseen details, I suspect there are Union rules against it, but it really would be cool if the contestants were allowed to start photographing their own builds. The Hero Shot challenge photos often clipped or completely missed the titular hero of each build. This is one of the major benefits of attending conventions in person, vs just looking at the photos online.
Regarding attaching the book at an angle, there’s a very easy trick to do that sort of thing. Take four 1x1 plates and place attach them to the base so they form a perfect square. Now, move each one an identical number of studs in either a CW or CCW direction. They should still form a perfect square, though the size will be different, and the square will now be rotated a few degrees. If you take the base of whatever you want to attach to it and rotate it the same number of degrees in the opposite direction, it will perfectly line up with those same four studs (basically you’re using either anti-studs or tubes that form a mirror image of the new square). Generally speaking, you should steer clear of 1x2 jumper plates because they do screw this up unless they are all oriented the same way.
Regarding the shift in challenge focus, there was a very legitimate criticism that the first season favored character builds, with one of the premiere character builders being one of the contestants. Besides the amusement park ride, the pinewood derby intro challenge, and the bridge challenge, it was pretty much just “build something that looks cool in X theme”. For the contestants it must have been a shock, but as
a viewer, more variety to the challenges is a welcome change (especially since there are more episodes this season).
@BJNemeth:
There were Hero Shot builds that were missing too. The press kit left a few out (one of the reasons I’d like to see the contestants do their own photography).
These comments are absolute madness
I love it
@Freddy_Hodson said:
"These comments are absolute madness
I love it"
I hate it. We should be talking about the actual subjects of this post as they deserve to be discussed. Not some grammar nonsense. Do that elsewhere. It's disrespectful to these two.
@Broken_Cheese_Slope said:
"Gotta say I am still a bit confused as to why they were the ones to be eliminated. "
Probably because their mouth barely moved and their other moving parts didn't pan out. Also because apparently the performance wasn't all that good (he wasn't opening the mouth up every time he was speaking). Still a great build, but at this stage of the competition, not enough.
@BJNemeth said:
".Disclaimer: I’ve met Mark multiple times (I shop at the store where he works), and I’m rooting for him and Steven. But after watching last week’s episode, I would have voted for the Musketeer."
Cool! LEGO Store or another kind of store? (No need to give me the name if it's the latter)
Seems arbitrary to judge a team for elimination based on their puppeteering skills from a show about deciding who's the best brick building team.
@darkstonegrey:
What gets you through to the next round is not being the best builder, but being the best at satisfying all of the requirements of the challenge. This is something that comes up again in the episode that aired last night. You can build the Sistine Chapel in 1:1 scale, but if the challenge is to make an RC car, you’re going home.
In this case, the challenge included building a working puppet with at least one special action, memorizing and delivering lines from a script, doing some improv lines, and operating the puppet. The other team at risk was their own partners, because they had the only puppet that broke during the performance.
But the only timeI recall them giving one team an automatic trip to the chopping block was when Mel & Jermaine failed to build their bridge flush with the road. Otherwise, it appears to have all been based on their total impression of each build. Did it have to be a toss-up between these two teams in the Puppet Masters episode? Maybe another team could have really phoned it in, and built a shoddy replica of a sock puppet that could wave a stick arm. If Frank Oz himself did the performance of a lifetime, would that be enough to offset the build? What if the build looked like real cloth with ten built-in movements, but the performer just froze up and didn’t deliver a single line?
If you want to advance on this show, there are two things that are paramount. You have to build to the complete list of requirements. Use it as a checklist, and don’t leave any boxes unchecked when the clock hits zero. And when the judges come around to give advice, take heed of everything they tell you. If they are critical of your design, they are telling you exactly what will get you eliminated if you blow them off.
Man Ijust wanted to know what people thought of the episode, i didnt want to read about people fighting on wether or not we should care if its lego or legos.
@PurpleDave
It was obvious who was going home this week by failing to satisfy the requirement for the final part of the challenge. But the judges didn't come round for the puppeteering challenge giving advise or criticism before-hand about performing on stage for a puppet show, so completely arbitrary reason to consider when make their decision. The show is about mastering the brick, not performance art, and a failed exercise in judging in my view.
@darkstonegrey:
It’s a show about mastering the challenges. The best builder in the world wouldn’t last long if they freeze up in front of a camera, if they can’t build fast, if they can’t build large, if they can’t keep track of the challenge requirements, or if they can’t build to the judges’ taste. The prize is $100,000. If you want to see people be judged purely on how cool their build is, AFOL conventions typically hand out trophies for that sort of thing. On this show, yes, you can absolutely turn in the best model, but get eliminated for what would normally be trivial reasons. Anyone who has watched the first season of this show should be forewarned that building in dark or monochromatic color schemes could be the deciding factor in how your build is judged. One of the most common comments I’ve seen, especially from Jamie, is that there always needs to be brighter colors. AFOL aesthetics skew pretty heavily in the other direction, but you’re not building to be judged by all of AFOLdom. You’re building for two specific judges, and anyone who wasn’t on the first season needs to go in with an awareness of what things the judges are looking for.