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 8 of the series, “Good vs. Evil” (3/26/2020), each team picked two minifigures from LEGO’s Collectible Minifigure Series 19, and turn them into either a team of superheroes or a squad of supervillains! The characters we picked would serve as the inspiration behind a secret hideout build. On top of this individual assignment, each “hero” team got partnered with a “villain” team and both teams were asked to collaborate on an epic battle scene together!
As such, to fit the parameters of the challenge, our build for this week actually comprised of four distinct models: a superhero headquarters disguised inside a Tech Center building; two individual vehicles (one for each of our heroes), and a joint battle scene between our pair of superheroes and fellow team Tyler and Amy’s pair of supervillains.
Despite presenting polished models that were up to our usual standards—a nice change after our Storybook build, which had turned out a bit messy—Christian and my competition also brought forth some amazing work this challenge. Unfortunately, this ultimately meant that “Good vs. Evil” turned out to be our final episode of LEGO Masters. In this highly competitive week, Christian and I placed in the bottom two and were, subsequently, chosen by the Brickmasters to be eliminated.
Read on for my special dissection of our models’ process, design choices, and more!
Choosing our Heroes
When presented with characters at the top of the episode, Christian and I had plentiful options to choose from. There were a ton of colorful characters available, minfigures full of whimsy. However, by the time Will summoned us out of the gallery, my partner and I had decided to select characters with a bit more of a serious aspect to them. Part of me wonders, in retrospect, what might have happened if we’d picked slightly zanier characters than the two we ended up with. Might our build have been more appealing to the Brickmasters if it had been more “out there"?” Questions like these, the what-ifs of the competition, can be hard to let go of!
During the selection process, we were attracted at once to the Galactic Bounty Hunter. His masked face, power armor, and technological instruments made him feel like a classic antihero to us. Christian, especially, vibed with this character; the Galactic Bounty Hunter appealed to his military side and love of science fiction. Plus, Christian and I had been watching The Mandalorian on Disney+ together during our times off-set, and this character was essentially an off-brand Mando. We couldn’t resist.
When it came to choosing our second character, we wanted to select a minifigure that would complement the Galactic Bounty Hunter. The Programmer, with her dark colored clothing and science focus, seemed a great fit. I also adored her cute little robot companion! I think our choices, at the end of the day, reflected our tropic selves: Christian’s character was “the brawn” and mine was “the brain!”
So we had our characters. The question then became: who will be the hero, and who will be the sidekick? Feminism and playing against expectations dictated that our programmer should be the main heroine; the superhero genre has enough of armored dudes stealing the spotlight!
Good vs. Evil, Modern vs. Ancient
Tyler and Amy’s characters were a Scorpion Queen mummy and an old-timey Archeologist. These turned out to be perfect foils to our own minifigures, because aside from mimicking our females-first impulse (they made the Scorpion Queen their supervillain, while the Archeologist became their henchman), Tyler and Amy had also picked characters who “went together.” While our two minifigures were tied by the common thread of technology, theirs were tied by the thread of uncovering the ancient world.
Ultimately, this led us to a grand thematic concept for our piece: ours was to be a battle not just between Good and Evil, but also between New and Old, between Technology and Mysticism. I think we made these dichotomies pretty explicit through the colors, styles, and shapes of our individual halves of this world, and I’m really pleased with how our final presentation comes across: it’s a clear showdown, with two distinct sides in diametric opposition to each other.
We decided it would make the most sense for our four characters and their respective armies to be fighting over an object to transcend both Technology and Mysticism, so we invented the Cyber-Crystal, an artifact with untold power and potential that could be used by either side. We chose to build a tall obelisk as a focal point in which we could house this central object.
Color Choices
Christian and I sought to differentiate our hideout as much as possible from Tyler and Amy’s, so we chose white as our building’s primary color. White immediately reads as modern, futuristic, clean, advanced, and “good,” so it felt like a perfect choice for us. I’ll admit that, with its large glass windows also taken into account, our Tech Center echoes the Eco Tower we built in Episode 5, “Mega City.” I did my best to differentiate our superhero headquarters as much as possible from that prior build; this new building is squarer, squatter, and has a few distinctive features of its own.
My favorite of these differentiators are the oversize circuit boards on the presentation side of the building. These were a very late addition to the model, and I included them in response to a critique from the Brickmasters that our clean, white building, while iconic and cartoony, just didn’t announce our superhero enough at first glance. The circuit boards, at least for me, made a generic white-and-glass structure into a building that could only belong to the Programmer.
We opted to make our terrain as verdant and vibrant as possible, to best contrast with Tyler and Amy’s Egyptian desert world. Our biome choices meant that, when we got to building the terrain for our battle, we could make worlds literally collide, with sandy tan and lush green competing with one another even as armies clashed above!
The Tech Center
Our Tech Center had three main stories. These, which were intended to be seen from the back of the model and not the presentation side, didn’t get their fair share of screen time on LEGO Masters—so, unfortunately, all the fun details Christian and I included therein weren’t ever seen. But I’m happy to get to share them with you now!
Inside the hill, on the bottom floor, we built an underground equipment depot, hangar and workspace. This included our costume changer, a weapons rack, some fuel canisters, an assortment of futuristic screens, and—my favorite of all!—a claw machine game full of LEGO $100 bills. Christian and I figured that, since the Galactic Bounty Hunter is seeking bounties, he had to be using all his money for good. But he also needed a playful way to store the extra, so I devised this cutesy arcade game (the blue box in bottom right of the above image) as a way to bring some levity to what was otherwise a fairly serious room.
Directly above the basement, at “ground floor” for the Tech Center, we designed a technology museum. Our idea about our characters was that they were scientists by day and heroes by night; so we wanted to get to show them in their "daily lives” a bit. The museum we built was full of all manner of fun details, from a huge atom sculpture to some Tesla coils, from a replica of one of the Programmer’s robots to an exhibit on computer technology through the ages. This exhibit is maybe my favorite unsung portion of the whole build. I devised a series of minifigure-scale machines, starting with a typewriter, progressing through a few old desktops, and ending up at a huge flat-screen computer. The micro-models were sweet, accurate, and sadly will never be seen!
On the top floor of the Tech Center, Christian and I worked together on a crowded computer room. We built monitors of all shapes and sizes, and draped and stacked them all over the place. I even took a handful of LEGO strings, jumbled them up in my hands, and dumped them against the back wall of the room to demonstrate a mess of haphazard wires!
Functions and Features
As usual, Christian and I couldn’t resist throwing a handful of motorized functions into our build. We ended up with five across the finished presentation. They were:
The “costume changer,” a rotating wall that could turn the Galactic Bounty Hunter into his geeky alter-ego and back automatically. This function landed us some praise from the Brickmasters, and I’m especially happy with how it turned out.
A set of work lights that could be lit in the basement, turning what was otherwise a very dark space into a brightly-lit one. I don’t think the production team managed to get them to turn on during “beauty shots” because, as you can see above, the bulbs in the ceiling don’t look illuminated.
An opening/closing hangar door in the hillside, which could slide out of view or close again on a remote control.
A rotating satellite array, up on the roof of the Tech Center.
Illumination inside the Cyber-Crystal, which did wonderfully at (literally) highlighting the focal object over which our superheroes and supervillains were fighting.
Up on the Roof
We designed the roof of the Tech Center to resemble an open laptop. The original Programmer minifigure carries her own white laptop, so this unorthodox architectural choice seemed appropriate! I had the idea to add the angled “screen” when thinking of more ways to spruce up our structure, and I think it worked great for adding new interest to the Tech Center. When I was building the laptop, I guess I was doing a pretty good job on it, because Brickmaster Amy told me she thought somebody had let me have Internet in the build room, which definitely wouldn’t have been allowed!
Aside from its solar panel “screen,” the floor of this laptop terrace is tiled with round “keys” and even a “track pad.” My favorite little detail is the row of USB ports on the side of the “keyboard”, seen above. A feature I had already invented for our rooftop before turning it into a laptop was the communications array, an artfully chaotic cluster of satellite dishes of myriad sizes. As I’ve mentioned before, we wanted the building to have some comical, playful touches, and this knot of dishes was definitely one of them. Plus, our heroes needed a way to field distress signals from across the world and across the galaxy!
As much as I loved the moving communications array, I do rather wish I’d found another place to put it, because its presence mars the “laptop” silhouette up there. The other major obfuscation up there is, of course, the Programmer’s mech suit.
Vehicle Builds
During this challenge, my fellow contestants and I got tasked with building an individual vehicle for our respective minifigures. We were instructed to build these so that they were “swooshable,” meaning playable, mobile, and—of course—designed to elicit a “swoosh” noise from whoever held them! Christian and I designed two awesome vehicles. I built the Programmer her “Circuit Mech,” and Christian built the Galactic Bounty Hunter his “Space Shark,” a hybrid spaceship/aircraft.
The Circuit Mech I designed had a roughly humanoid structure that broke from the perfectly human shape in a few principal ways. Instead of single-jointed knees and feet, the mech had agile double-jointed legs with rocket boosters for feet. I replaced one of its hands with a USB “cannon,” and I endowed it with a set of folding cicada wings. Designing these functional wings was tremendously fun; I geared both sets of wings together, so that by folding/unfolding one side, the other side would follow suit.
Christian’s sleek Space Shark, meanwhile, also had a bunch of signature touches. His aircraft featured folding wings, moving flaps on its wings, sharp fins, huge rocket boosters, and a multi-barrel cannon in its front. He was inspired by the snub-nosed shape of Cold War planes like the MiG-21 and wanted to emulate that silhouette in a more futuristic way. I think he did an amazing job with his personal craft!
We wanted the vehicles we designed to simultaneously adhere to the color palates we’d established for each of our special minifigures, but also stand out from the rest of the scene with unique secondary colors. For the Circuit Mech, I used lime green for the first and only time on our build as its circuit innards; meanwhile, Christian added a cheeky pink racing stripe down the mid-line of the Space Shark.
Bake Sale
The idea behind the infamous bake sale, which did feel a bit out-of-place on our finished presentation, started from a logical idea. It came about as the answer to a fundamental question we had about one of our heroes’ motivation. We wondered: why does the Galactic Bounty Hunter pursue financial gain if he’s a good guy? There had to be an altruistic or philanthropic motive behind his bounty-hunting, and this had to be apparent in our build’s storytelling.
Our original concept for our superheroes was to make them teachers by day, crime-fighters by night, and to hide their secret headquarters underneath a school. We’d then demonstrate how all the money the Galactic Bounty Hunter had collected from his intergalactic exploits was actually going towards supporting the school, and the easiest way we thought to convey raising money for a school was through a good, old-fashioned bake sale! We planned to have a tube or funnel, or something, connecting the vat of money up to the sale.
However, as the story we were building changed and adjusted to better align with Tyler and Amy’s world—in other words, to ensure that we’d end up with a cohesive world across all three main models—Christian and I ditched the school concept, but also failed to re-evaluate the bake sale. Even as our headquarters changed from traditional school to science center, and as the Programmer’s story came to be dominant in our side, Christian and I could think of no better way to demonstrate a wholesome use for bounty money than as a way to support a local small business. Hence our choice to set some of the Programmer’s robots towards the bake sale, buying as much food as the heroes’ huge stash of money could buy.
I wish we had used the area in front of our Tech Center on something a bit more in-line with the rest of the build. The bake sale turned out to be a “logical” solution to a question that wasn’t terribly important, and just caused more of a distraction than anything else.
Composing the Battle
For our battle, Christian, Tyler, Amy and I knew we wanted a multi-tiered fight sequence involving a variety of forces. To give the battle a sense of epic proportion, we knew we’d have to manufacture minions for both sides. Tyler and Amy put together an army of skeletons, while we assembled a squad of robots. Both mini-armies tied back into the original characters and, in my opinion, played well into the ancient/modern dichotomy we wanted to emphasize. We posed minions from both sides ascending the obelisk to try and secure the Cyber-Crystal, skeletons with pickaxes and robots with buzzsaws.
We wanted all four of our original characters to be highlighted amidst the chaos… and so we chose to elevate the characters not just figuratively, but also literally! The Mummy Queen rode her fire scorpion midway up the obelisk; the Programmer stood atop her giant robot; the Acheologist’s plane zoomed around the obelisk; and the Galactic Bounty Hunter hung suspended in midair by a laser blast he was shooting, in what Brickmaster Jaime called the “most dynamic minfigure posing [he’d] seen all season,” a point of pride I’ve definitely held onto!
Mega-Robot
In the central battle sequence, the Programmer rides atop a huge, blown-up version of the little robot that came with her figure. I found this teensy robot to be adorable, and knew it would be a fun challenge to recreate it at enormous scale. But the mega-robot has a few tricks up its sleeves that the original doesn’t have, like huge boxing gloves, missile arrays and a digital face with t-r-o-u-b-l-e written all over it. I’m quite proud of my exploded replica of the minifigure-scale robot, and think it’s the most fun and direct callback to the particular accessories unique to our Programmer.
All in all, I’m proud of the work Christian and I did on this week’s challenge. I’m glad that our final build got to be one we enjoyed and approved of, rather than one about which we might have had huge regrets. And I hope you’ve enjoyed these behind-the-build analyses I’ve been putting together! Don’t worry: more creations, and blog entries, are coming soon.
Thanks for reading! If you have any other questions or comments about this model, feel free to leave them in the comments below.