“I’ll take ‘The Rapists’ for 200,” said Darrell Hammond on the television, impersonating Sean Connery.
“That’s ‘therapists,’” Will Ferrell replied, impersonating Alex Trebek, as I laughed loudly. “Not ‘the rapists.’”
“Have you seen any of the other times they’ve done ‘Celebrity Jeopardy’ on Saturday Night Live?” Mark asked.
“You showed me one last year,” I said. In those days, my brother Mark stayed up on Saturday nights recording Saturday Night Live, and if one sketch was not funny enough for his liking, he would rewind during the commercial and record over it. This way, he had a tape of the best parts of Saturday Night Live to rewatch later, which he inevitably did every time I came back to Plumdale to visit my family for a few days.
I continued watching “Celebrity Jeopardy,” as guest host David Duchovny impersonated Jeff Goldblum, rambling incoherently like his character from the movie Jurassic Park, and Sean Connery continued acting hostile to Alex Trebek for whatever reason possible. “That’s where you got that Jeff Goldblum impression earlier,” I said.
“Yeah,” Mark replied. Earlier that afternoon, Mark’s friend Cody Kaneko had been over at the house, and they were outside showing me a new game they invented called Celebrity Baseball. One of them would pitch to the other while they were impersonating celebrities, and in character, they would strike out, get hit by the pitch, and generally mimic horrible baseball injuries. Mark was acting just like David Duchovny’s impression of Jeff Goldblum on Saturday Night Live; I did not get the reference earlier.
“I’m the cock of the walk!” Sean Connery shouted on the screen. Mark repeated the line in the same voice.
“Okay, then,” I replied.
A little later, after the tape ran out, something uninteresting came on the television. I asked Mark, “What do you wanna do now?”
“I don’t know,” Mark answered.
“Do you have any new Nintendo games?”
“Not really. Not since last time you were here.”
I looked around trying to think of what else we could do. Today was Friday, but that did not matter since there was nothing exciting for me to do. I did not visit my family often these days, because I often got bored quickly. I had no friends left in Plumdale whom I was still in touch with. My family was not involved with any activities that would lead to meeting new people. And Mark was often busy with basketball or baseball practice, depending on the time of year, although that was not the case right now in early August. He was now sixteen, almost seventeen, and spending time with his own friends like Cody took priority over spending time with his older brother who lived two and a half hours away. But suddenly an idea popped into my head, and I said something that ended up defining the rest of my trip home, without even knowing when I said it whether Mark would approve or not:
“You wanna get the Legos out?”
“Yeah!” Mark shouted. We both ran to the closet in Mark’s room and began pushing the two large boxes containing our entire Lego collection into the living room.
Mom, drawn to react instinctively to the sound of plastic bricks shaking against each other, emerged from elsewhere in the house and stopped us. “No,” she said. “We don’t have room to set up the Legos in the living room right now.”
“What if we build them in Mark’s room?” I asked. “Mark, is that ok?”
“Sure,” Mark said, shrugging.
“I guess,” Mom replied unenthusiastically.
“Yes!” I said, helping Mark push the Lego boxes back into his room.
I do not remember when I first took interest in Lego. My earliest distinct Lego memory came on Christmas morning, 1980, when I opened a set called Main Street, which had just been released that year. The box showed two buildings, a car dealership and a hotel, along with a construction crane, a car, a truck, and a popcorn stand, on two road base plates. I was still an only child in 1980; Mark was born in late 1981. Being a precocious child who could read from a young age, my excitement quickly turned to disappointment when I pointed to the box and said, “But this says, ‘Ages 6 to 12,’ and I’m only four. I’m too young for this.”
“If you can read that, I think you’ll be ok,” Dad replied.
Although the 1980 Main Street set was the first Lego set I remember getting, it was not my first. I already had a few assorted Lego sets that I still to this day do not know where they came from. They might have been given as gifts earlier than Christmas 1980, or we might have gotten them from neighbors who were getting rid of them. I accumulated many more sets throughout my childhood, as did Mark once he was old enough. Our Lego collection got played with continuously until I moved away for school, and still occasionally since then. We did not often keep the buildings and cars from the sets built as they were intended to, though, preferring to take them apart and rebuild custom buildings. Sometimes we got quite creative in what we built. The last time Mark and I played Lego, a couple years ago when I was home, Mom saw Mark building urinals for his strip club. “If the people who make Lego could see what you boys do with them, they would be shocked,” Mom said.
I had read once in a Lego product catalog that the toys were properly referred to as “Lego bricks” and not “Legos.” I would come to understand later in life that there was a legal reason for this distinction: if “Legos” became a common generic noun for interlocking brick toys, then The Lego Group could lose their trademark on the name. At the time, though, I did not understand the need for such picky behavior, and I referred to Lego bricks as “Legos” regularly.
By the time Mark and I went to bed that night, we had built a small city on his bedroom floor, with houses, stores, a police station, and a hospital. We had also begun building a stadium for Moport, the sport that Mark and I played with his friends combining elements of soccer, football, and hockey.
Starting at some point in my teens, whenever Mark and I would build a new Lego city, we would have the same recurring characters living in our city. One of my characters was a guy named Rico Suave; I got his name from a silly hip-hop song from my teens by a one-hit wonder named Gerardo Mejia. Rico hung out with another guy named James who wore a do-rag. Mark had more colorful and interesting recurring characters, including a strange woman named Griselda and a monkey figure, originally from a pirate set, named Spank the Monkey. For this Lego city, Mark added a new character, a king figure from a castle set who rode around town on a horse, talking like Darrell Hammond’s Sean Connery impersonation from Saturday Night Live.
Griselda ran a store called Griselda’s Bargain Center that sold random assorted objects. For this Lego city, Mark wrote “We fix cars” on a piece of paper and taped it next to the door of Griselda’s Bargain Center. I drove Rico Suave to Griselda’s Bargain Center and said that the car wasn’t working. “What’s wrong with it?” Mark asked in character as Griselda, making a screechy old lady voice.
“I think one of the cylinders isn’t firing,” I said, trying to pretend that I knew something about cars.
“We can get that fixed right up for you!” Griselda shouted.
I got up to use the bathroom, telling Mark out of character that I would be right back. When I returned to the Lego city, Mark had attached small round pieces to every available stud of Rico’s car. “It’ll work great now with all these cylinders!” he said, in character as Griselda.
“That’s not where cylinders go!” I protested. “They’re in the engine!”
“Do you want your car to run right or not?”
I removed the cylinders from Rico’s car and began driving it through the Lego city. Mark took it from me and disassembled it into two pieces. “It won’t work without the cylinders,” he said in Griselda’s voice.
“Fine. Whatever,” I said. I reluctantly replaced the ridiculous cylinders on Rico’s car and drove it around the city. “Rico had a date tonight. Now she’s not going to like him if his car looks weird like this.”
“I guess she’s not the one for him,” Mark replied.
The following morning, while we were eating breakfast, Mom asked Mark, “Boz is coming over today, right?”
“Yeah.”
I got an idea and debated for a few seconds whether or not to say it. I spoke up eventually. “Can you ask Boz to bring his camera? We should make another movie, using the Legos.”
“Yeah!” Mark agreed.
I never owned any sort of video camera growing up. The modern-day technology enabling everyone to have a video recording device in their pocket did not arrive in the world until I was into my thirties. I always wanted a video camera, because I had so many creative ideas, but video cameras were too expensive, according to my parents. Last fall, I made a movie with the youth group kids from my church in Jeromeville, based on my Dog Crap and Vince characters. I borrowed a camera from one of the families at church. When I went home for Christmas, Mark and I got another spontaneous movie idea; we hurriedly wrote a script and borrowed a camera from Mark’s friend Boz. Boz played the title character, listed in the credits under his real name, Matthew Bosworth, while Mark and I had the two major supporting roles. We got that idea approximately three days before I was planning to go back to Jeromeville, so we were on a tight schedule in addition to a nonexistent budget. In reference to that, we called our production company “72 Hour Films.”
Within about an hour, we had written a script, a story about aliens invading a peaceful town and a band of citizens coming together to fight the aliens. When Boz arrived at our house, Mark and I were working on moving the Lego city outside, because the yard would provide better lighting, and because we had some scenes planned that would be too messy to film indoors.
“Looks good so far,” Boz observed. “How are we going to do the animation? I don’t know if stop-motion will work on this camera.”
“Nothing fancy like that,” I said. “You’ll be able to see our hands moving the guys, and their mouths won’t move. This isn’t going to look like a big-budget production.”
“I see,” Boz said, chuckling. “So what’s our first shot?”
“First we need to build a few more buildings. The rest of the Legos are in Mark’s room.”
“Okay!” Boz exclaimed. The three of us went back inside the house and built everything we still needed to make the movie, starting with a farmhouse where the farmer’s animals would be found mutilated.
Boz picked up Rico’s car and asked, “What’s wrong with this car?” Boz asked.
I explained to Boz about the cylinders, then I got an idea. “Mark?” I asked. “Will you let me take the cylinders off if I make Rico drive an El Camino instead?”
“You can make an El Camino with Legos?” Mark asked.
“I can try.”
“Okay.”
For some reason. Mark and I found the Chevrolet El Camino inherently humorous. The car, popular with gangbangers and low rider enthusiasts, looked like a sedan or station wagon from the front but had the bed of a pickup truck in the back. Mark referred to it as a “cartruck.” I looked through the pile of loose pieces and rebuilt Rico’s Lego car to have a truck bed in the back. “How’s this?” I asked.
“Perfect,” Mark replied. Boz laughed enthusiastically.
We shot our movie, which now had the intentionally bad title “The Alien Killers,” mostly in order, although we saved the messy shots for last, so that we would not have to clean up in between shots. I moved the farmer figure around his farm as he said something about missing and disfigured animals, which were not present in the shot. He then came upon a giant egg, which was actually a water balloon filled with shampoo and other gooey substances. To record him driving into town, I pushed his truck along the sidewalk and let go of the truck. Boz recorded the moving truck, but not my hand.
By the time Boz finished recording the farmer talking to the police, with my hands moving the figures up and down as they spoke, Mom had come outside to watch us. “Does it matter that you can see your hands on camera?” Mom asked.
“No,” I said. “This is a low-budget production.”
Next, we recorded the alien spaceship, propelled by Mark’s hand, crashing into Rico’s house while he was not home. With their spaceship damaged, the aliens, portrayed by regular Lego figures with brick-shaped heads, needed a getaway vehicle. Portraying one of the aliens, Mark said, “This looks like a high-quality, fast Earth vehicle,” in the kind of nasal voice with which aliens typically speak in low budget science fiction films.
“What is this writing?” I said, in character as the other alien. “‘El Camino,’” I continued. Apparently these aliens had been observing Earth culture long enough that they could both speak English, even when speaking to other aliens who shared a native language, and pronounce Spanish words correctly. We certainly were not making this movie with the goal of winning an Oscar for best screenplay.
In our next scene, the human citizens of the town along with Spank the Monkey would be coming together to discuss what to do about this alien threat. I had it written on my script that Mark would be playing the character who stepped up to lead the Alien Killers, but that his lines would be ad-libbed. Boz held the camera, so Mark explained to Boz, “After you say all the lines, just let it keep recording. I’m going to do something.”
“That’s the character whose lines aren’t in the script,” I said, “right?”
“Exactly.”
Boz pressed Record, and I began speaking in character as several different people. The townspeople decided to form a group called the Alien Killers, who would seek out and destroy the alien invaders. “Who’s gonna be our leader?” I said in character as the farmer who discovered the giant alien egg.
At this point, from off camera, Mark’s new character wearing the king clothes jumped into the meeting. “I’m the cock of the walk!” he exclaimed, in the voice of Darrell Hammond’s Sean Connery character from Saturday Night Live. I rolled my eyes and tried to suppress laughter, since we were still recording. Mark continued rambling some of Sean Connery’s lines.
We continued recording as the Alien Killers wandered outside of town to find where the aliens had landed. When Rico saw his stolen El Camino parked on the side of the road, the Alien Killers began exploring the countryside. When they came across the giant egg, the Darrell Hammond-Sean Connery character cut it open with a sword, and we punctured the water balloon, showering all of the nearby Lego figures with a wet sudsy mess. “Ew!” Boz shouted with the camera still running. We decided to leave that line in the movie, since someone would probably be expressing disgust after getting hit with all of that slime.
After we finished recording the rest of the scenes that involved alien slime, we cleaned everything up. I moved all of the Lego city back into the house, a little at a time, while Mark and Boz played GoldenEye on Nintendo 64. Boz went home around dinner time.
The following day, we recorded opening and closing credits, and I borrowed a second videocassette recorder from my grandparents so that I could edit the film. I was done by mid-afternoon. We called ourselves 72 Hour Films, but we made The Alien Killers in only 31 hours. It was silly, but since it looked like it was intentionally supposed to be bad, it worked.
The Alien Killers was my last attempt at making a live-action film. Over the next couple months, I tried getting the kids from church together to make a second Dog Crap and Vince movie, but it was too hard to work around everyone’s schedules to get them together. We only recorded one day, and we only got a few scenes recorded on that one day since Ted Hunter, who played Vince, flaked on us. I have done many other creative projects since, but not another live action movie.
At some point after I went back to Jeromeville, Mom disassembled the Lego city and put everything in the attic. But every time I heard the topic of Lego come up in conversation, I would tell people that I was still playing Lego up until I was almost twenty-two years old, and I was not ashamed of that fact.
All of our Lego stuff, including the bricks, baseplates, instructions, catalogs, and idea books, sat in the attic collecting dust until 2022. That year, at age forty-five, I went to visit home for a few days in June after my year as a teacher ended, and Mom, now seventy-two years old, showed me the attic, which she had been trying to clean and organize. She pointed to the two large Lego boxes and said, “If you ever want to take the Legos back home with you, you can.”
“I think I might do that,” I said. “It would be fun to see what I find. Maybe build some stuff again, just for fun.”
“But if you do, check with Mark, since some of those were his.”
Later that day I texted Mark, who was living in another state at the time; he said it was fine for me to take all of the Lego stuff back home. It sat in my garage for a few weeks, then I brought it into the house to organize pieces and see what all was in the box. I still had instructions for most of my old sets; I built some of them and made some custom buildings with the rest of the pieces. I eventually moved them to the spare room in my house. Most of the cars and buildings we made in 1998 had been disassembled, but while I was looking through everything, I found Rico Suave in his El Camino, perfectly intact.
Having a hobby in today’s world, at an age where I have a job and can choose what to spend money on, is different from having a hobby as a child. I discovered the Pick-A-Brick feature on the Lego website, where I could order individual parts rather than buying a set, and a few months after that, I found a used Lego store in my city that also sold individual parts. Pretty soon, my little Lego city had grown to take over the entire spare room. I have also made friends with many other adult Lego fans on social media. With money not being tight for me, it was the perfect time for me to rediscover an expensive childhood hobby. So far, no aliens have destroyed my city and laid slimy eggs, but anything could happen with a hobby that enables and encourages creativity.
Readers: Do you have a childhood hobby that you rediscovered in adulthood? Or any childhood hobbies you would like to get back into? Or, if you are not an adult yet, do you have any hobbies that you hope stick with you into adulthood? Tell me about your hobbies in the comments!
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