Fans of all things Lego may have already seen the recently released “Lego Movie 2,” but for a more up-close experience, Legoland enlisted its master builders to bring a part of the movie directly to the theme park.
Visitors to the Carlsbad, Calif., park can now experience key scenes from the film at the new Lego Movie 2 Experience, which re-creates a set from the film.
Both the basement scene and the bedroom of Bianca, one of the human characters featured in the animated film, are showcased in the new attraction. Not only are the rooms re-created with the Lego models seen in the film, but they’re outfitted with the same furnishings, down to the carpeting and hardwood floors.
The Lego movie franchise has proved to be popular, with two spinoffs and now the sequel to the original 2014 “The Lego Movie.” “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part” didn’t have quite the stellar opening the first one did, garnering about half the revenue that the “Lego” movie took in when it opened.
The computer-animated film takes place five years after the events of the first movie, now set in Apocalypseburg, a post-apocalyptic version of the original Bricksburg.
Occupying the space where Legoland’s Imagination Zone had been, the Lego Movie 2 Experience was a labor-intensive endeavor, beginning with a weeklong visit to the Vancouver, British Columbia, set where the live-action scenes of the movie were filmed.
“I got to go up to Vancouver and be on the live-action set while they were filming and we had to photograph everything to reassemble it here at the park,” said Tim Sams, head of the model shop at the Carlsbad park. “No one was allowed to have cameras on set there except for me. So I documented the entire set so we could make sure it fit in the space here.”
Attention to detail
It required two huge shipping trucks to transport the disassembled set, including the Lego models and all the non-Lego contents of the two rooms, Sams said.
As much as was possible, the Lego models, from the Statue of Liberty to a fist-shaped space ship, were transported intact. But things happen.
“A lot of the models did make it back at least in larger broken pieces,” he said. “There were instances where we opened a box and we didn’t know what we were looking at. The whole thing took six model builders 640 hours with no instructions, so it was important to get really good photos.
“It’s more fun than anything else, like a large jigsaw puzzle. We’re master model builders and we do this daily, so I wouldn’t say it was difficult.”
In all, from the time the project was conceived to the process of clearing out the site and constructing the film set, the attraction took five months to complete.
Attention to detail was paramount in mimicking the film experience. For instance, the replication of Bianca’s room includes the city and palace she was building in the movie from Lego Duplo bricks. Also featured are some of the film’s more memorable characters such as Queen Watevera Wa-Nabi, the queen of the distant Systar System, and General Mayhem, a masked space pilot.
