In early 2020, my friend Christian Cowgill and I appeared in the first American season of LEGO Masters, a reality-style building competition show. In Episode 7 of the series, “Storybook” (3/18/2020), all the teams were presented with an identical, Mad Lib-style story, the blanks of which had been filled in creatively by a group of kids. For the challenge, each team had to present their own recreation of this zany tale involving a “book chicken,” a “horse that can do gymnastics,” a “Taker-Waker,” and more.
For our model, Christian and I chose to build the interior of the Taker-Waker’s house, which the storybook specified as being messy and full of stolen toys. This setting choice, however, turned out to be a bad one. Our decision to build an enclosed structure literally boxed us in, and guided us towards manifesting a more realistic interpretation of the “Land of Koo Koo Magic” than other teams. Unfortunately, this stylistic direction left the Brickmasters cold. On top of this, since we took the story at face value, we intentionally built a cluttered house… but ended up with an unintentionally messy-looking build.
Ultimately, our entry for the storybook challenge landed us in the bottom two teams for the first time. Although Christian and I weren’t eliminated, this was still my least favorite build of the season. Read on for my special dissection of this model’s process, design choices, and more.
Color, Motifs, and Design Choices
Our storybook vignette consisted of more than two dozen sub-models. To best tell our version of this story, we felt the need to squeeze numerous objects into our build, from the four main characters to the countless toys, from enormous pieces of furniture to a disco cloud. I wish we’d edited down a bit more, because the sheer volume of sub-models we included in our presentation turned out to be a liability for our scene as a whole.
Christian and I tried to be extremely careful about how we used color in our model, because we didn’t want objects to disappear, commingle, or become confused with one another. As you can tell by looking at the build above, though, we set ourselves a bit of an impossible task on this front. Despite having made deliberate choices for each sub-model’s color schemes, and despite our best attempts to avoid clashing or messiness by strategically placing sub-models far from others of similar hues, we ended up with a jumbled impression where one object was hard to discern from another at first glance. The only sub-models I think really stand out in a color sense are the tan Gymnastics Horse and the black Taker-Waker… and these two merely benefit from being the largest non-yellow shapes in our vignette.
For the house’s walls, we chose a mottled pattern of yellow, which I still believe was a strong and smart choice for a story-book world. If we’d played our cards right, a yellow wall could have served us as a stark canvas, a vibrant backdrop against which we could clearly silhouette our objects and characters. However—again—we shot ourselves in the foot, this time by complicating that simple yellow surface with brown lattices. The “woodwork” was a thoughtful texture, and it gave the Taker-Waker’s house a sense of age, but it also created an extra layer of color and detail in a build already drowning in both those things.
The Book Chicken
When allocating jobs at the top of our build, Christian and I decided—due to my experience in creature-making and designing movement—it would be most logical for me to spearhead our functional, organic characters.
The first of these I addressed was the Book Chicken. Several other teams built their Book Chickens like an open book with a chicken-like head, tail, and legs, i.e., with the book as the body of the fantastical creature. I don’t know why, but the idea that occurred to me, and the one I decided to run with, was making the book the head of this crazy chicken, not its body. I’m glad in retrospect that this was the design I chose, since it differentiated our Book Chicken from the rest of the pack.
Initially, I positioned the book vertically, with googly eyes one on each cover of the book. However, after feedback from the Brickmasters—who said the chicken didn’t look very cute, that way!—I changed the direction of the book to open up and down like a traditional mouth. This enabled me to build a pseudo-beak and eyes on top of the book, creating a much friendlier-looking animal.
The Book Chicken in our build bounced up and down. I achieved this by running a long lever from its body into a functional area, which we disguised as a “cheese pit” for our Gymnastics Horse. A motor beneath the pit spun a cam, which sequentially hit the shorter side of the lever, thereby rhythmically lifting and dropping the Book Chicken.
A Horse that can do Gymnastics
This horse and its gymnastic trick are the bit of our scene of which I’m proudest… not least because, without any photo reference on set, I managed to build an animal that actually looked somewhat like a horse! (I will admit that, before we gave him a mane, the horse looked a bit more like a camel.)
I designed this animal around its function. A motorized mechanism inside the body of the horse turned a small spur gear. This, when it rotated, torqued the whole body of the horse up and around a much larger spur gear that I’d fixed in place. This meant that when the motor activated, the horse could jump up into a passable hand stand. It was pretty cool feature; I was quite happy with how it worked.
The motion of the head, which reciprocated a bit as the horse raised himself up, wasn’t actually motorized; it was just moved by pressure. As the horse’s body torqued forward, the head and neck—which were on their own pivot—had to accommodate upward as the moving body forced them against a fixed surface. It was a coincidental and unexpected motion that brought extra life to this already acrobatic animal.
A little visual pun that’s probably hard to notice, but I thought worth mentioning: our Gymnastics Horse is doing his gymnastics on a pommel horse. Funny, eh?
The Taker-Waker
Christian and I envisioned the Taker-Waker in a very traditional sense. We designed ours to mimic the Wicked Witch of the West, the antagonist from The Wizard of Oz. We wanted the Taker-Waker to telegraph as a villain, so it made sense to us to lean on the negative connotations surrounding this iconic, green-skinned witch. In retrospect, I see our straightforward interpretation on the Taker-Waker as emblematic of our difficulty with the prompt itself… after all, we never thought to build anything as creative as a rat or a raccoon, like some of the other teams. More than anything else, our lack of outside-the-box thinking was what landed us in the bottom two during this challenge.
Our Taker-Waker had a function of her own which, due to factors outside our control, never appeared on screen. I designed her wand arm to be voluntarily moveable by means of a motorized worm gear. The mechanism was simple, even foolproof… However, something in the electronics themselves stubbornly refused to work as intended. No matter how many times I swapped out motors, battery boxes, or remotes for fresh ones, the arm wouldn’t obey commands given to it! For me, this was an additional and unwelcome frustration during what was already a stressful, dissatisfying build process.
Evil Gymnastics Horse
When our kid, Nate—who was a total hoot, and very creative—told us that, for the twist, we’d be building an Evil Gymnastics Horse popping out of the ground, I was glad to get to replicate one of my favorite elements of our original build. The Evil Gymnastics Horse looked and worked just like the Gymnastics Horse, except that his colors mirrored those of the Taker-Waker (to emphasize the alliance between them) and, rather than operating with his forelegs fixed in place, his gear-driven limbs acted as levers which raised and lowered his tilting body.
Late in the challenge, Christian and I decided to make our horses look less literal by giving them flaming manes and tails. The Gymnastics Horse’s dark tan hair became blue, while the Evil Gymnastics Horse’s black became fiery red and orange. As much as I liked the change, and thought it brought extra whimsy into our Land of Koo Koo Magic, this small detail helped little in our losing battle against the entrenched “realism” of our vignette.
Disco Chickens
The other portion of Nate’s imaginative twist we had to build was a group of Disco Chickens, wearing toupees, falling from the sky. Just as the Evil Gymnastics Horse was a dark mirror of the Gymnastics Horse, these Disco Chickens were like distorted reflections of our original Book Chicken. While I worked on the Evil Gymnastics Horse, Christian mass-produced a small army of chickens, each clad in bell-bottom pants and a stark bowl-cut toupee. Some of the chickens even wore colorful shades!
Because the Disco Chickens were built using the same body structure as the Book Chicken, they came with a predetermined Technic axle connection point, which made hanging them all over the build in crazy ways pretty straightforward. However, as fun and expressive as the Disco Chickens were, they too weren’t enough to save our build, especially after our “disco cloud” got mistaken by some of the kids for a mountain.
Toy Tributes
To make our Taker-Waker’s stolen toys interesting and unique, Christian and I came up with an awesome idea: we opted, through the assortment of toys we built, to pay homage to the past work of our fellow LEGO Masters teams. We designed a different toy for each of the ten original partnerships, including ourselves. These ten micro-builds referenced ten signature models from previous episodes of the show.
Since this homage aspect of our storybook scene didn’t make it to air, I thought it would be fun to share the builds’ subjects and corresponding teams with you here:
Aaron and Christian: Dragon Prince (Episode 4, Movie Mashup)
Krystle and Amy: Cyberpunk City (Episode 5, Mega City)
Kara and Jessie: Rocket Ship (Episode 2, Space Smash)
Travis and Corey: Pinata (Episode 3, Cut in Half)
Sam and Jessica: Beanstalk (Episode 5, Mega City)
Mel and Jermaine: Legor (Episode 2, Space Smash)
Richard and Flynn: Cuckoo Clock (Episode 3, Cut in Half)
Manny and Nestor: Timmy the Monkey (Episode 3, Cut in Half)
Tyler and Amy: Telescope (Episode 3, Cut in Half)
Mark and Boone: Lime Time/Green Machine (Episode 6: Need for Speed/Super Bridge)
Party Time!
The disco cloud, despite its ambiguous shape, did contain a fun little surprise: a spinning disco ball with an assortment of lights directed at it. These, when illuminated, shone directly on the ball and turned it into the center of the party. Under studio lights, these supplemental LEGO light fixtures’ rays weren’t hyper-visible in our build, but it’s the thought that counts, right?
In general, the storybook challenge prompt demanded skills not in Christian and my wheelhouses. We built in scales outside our comfort zones, and in a more cartoonish style than we normally would have. Despite the shortcomings of this week’s build, I’m proud that my partner and I attempted something unlike anything we’d ever done before.
Thanks for reading! If you have any other questions or comments about this model, feel free to leave them in the comments below.