CATZILLA Memories

Sophie has a long history or causing destruction and mayhem in the town.  If we're truthful about it, she generally likes to just be close to us and watch what we're working on.  She will carefully and gingerly step around the crowded streets and not cause any REAL damage....  But what fun is THAT?!?

So naturally we created the CATZILLA character for her to play.. and since the internet didn't already have enough cat pictures on it, here is a MEGA collection of Sophie's greatest destructive moments!

Bad Guy Charges Police Barricades

Most of the citizens of Bricksburgh are good people but occasionally one them will end up on the run from the cops. This man must have committed some crime. (Maybe he's a stud dealer or a bricknapper.) Either way, he got himself into a police chase, but the police have a a good and effective method of stopping him.

Failure to Yield

As you may have read earlier, we had some car crash drama in our household recently.  Someone rear-ended one of our cars at a stop sign.  No one was hurt and our car has since been repaired, but it seemed like as good a time as any to show you some pictures of a recent chain reaction crash.   Tyler took all these pictures-- they were a complete surprise to me when I emptied the camera card!  He tells a great little story though...  as I think you'll agree:

Uh-oh...  something has happened here for sure!

Grand Prix of Bricksburgh

Growing up I used to watch Formula 1 races every chance I got.  Senna, Prost, Mansell...  those were the big names of the day.  I also had a rudimentary simulator on the computer that featured all of the race tracks on the F1 schedule.  My favorite-- by far--  was Monaco.  Something about the tightness of the circuit combined with the dense scenery to heighten the virtual sensation of speed.  Naturally, I would act out those races in my Legotown too (this was about 1986).  I'd transform all the sedans in town into "stock cars" and use the police car as a pace car.  A couple times I even stripped them down to chassis pieces with roof slope noses to look like F1 race cars!  Eventually Lego filled that void and began making ACTUAL race track/related sets.  Of all those, one is CLEARLY the best.... and we have two of them.

What to do....? what to do...?    Let me tell you.

Crash Test

Tyler is off this week, but we'll be posting a complete video tour and accompanying blog post that we prepared before he left.  It'll be ready in a couple days.  In the meantime, here's a crash test animation that Tyler made at the Victory Raceway Complex shortly before we shot the video tour.

He did this test animation of a crash on the front straight.   As this was only a test, we haven't added any sound or done anything in the way of backdrop or lighting...  Still, it gives you an idea of some of the possibilities.   I was going to just keep it to ourselves but since uploads to YouTube are free (yay!) I figured there was no harm in sharing it.

Running a Redlight

It's been a while since we had a little gratuitous crashing around here.  So, let's have some fun, get out some rescue equipment, and have ourselves a good old fashioned traffic accident.   

These pictures were shot at the old house, on the old tables-- but they'll be new to you!   We never intended these to be used as a stop-motion video or anything, they just tell the story of an accident and rescue from various angles.  Ready to go?  Buckle up and click on!

Not in My Backyard

We're in the process of planning the new Bricksburgh Legotown tables.  As we've previously written, the town will be located on two tables of 2 or 3 levels each.  In the last post we described and linked the new sets that will be joining the airport complex in the new town.  One of the biggest considerations when planning the town-- just as in real life-- is determining where the airport will go.  No one wants to have jets taking off and landing in their backyard and yet, that is exactly how "old Bricksburgh" was laid out.  Pictured below, you can see that while the downtown and beach areas were on the top level, the bottom level was for what was leftover, the neighborhood and the airport.

In designing the new town (and the new tables) we are going to have a much larger airport/shuttle launching complex.  To better explain our design ideas, We've pulled out some pictures from the previous versions of the town as we explore the possibilities...

The Mail Must Go Through

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds....  and neither do street lights, nor bus stops, nor fences, nor dead end streets...

Death From Above

Growing up overseas and spending lots of time on ski slopes in the Alps was very inspiring.  We rode cable cars all over the mountains to get around the ski areas and like most Lego kids, I was determined to replicate real life in my Legotown.  I don't have any surviving pictures of the BEST cable car system I made....  all I have is this, a crude "cargo" version:

I know it doesn't look like much, but bear with me... it'll make more sense in a minute.

I Can Still Hear You!

With the prospects of a quick move to a new house with an EMPTY garage gone, it is beginning to look like our Subaru will keep its loud broken exhaust until the weather gets warmer.  I'm just not a fan of crawling around on a cold driveway and scraping my dry wintered hands on rusty undercarriage bits.  So I will continue the thread I started a week or so ago and live vicariously through our trusty Lego repair shop...  where the weather is always warm enough to work outside (if you're made of plastic) and the parts just snap on and off.

Historical Airport

It has been a busy week around here... so I'm late again.   We will work to correct that.  
I found some pictures of what our airport looked like in its earlier days and I thought I'd share them.  These also will help me come in for a "soft landing" this week because... well, there is still a lot going on around here! I hope you enjoy some scenes from our airport's history.

What's That Sound?!

It is pretty hard for us to sneak up on anyone lately.  Our Subaru has a hole in the exhaust and rumbles and roars like a Top Fuel Dragster (no flames though, which is good).   With the weather being so wet and snowy I have not been able to attempt any repair, so we're just thumping around town scaring all the little kids until I can.   So... in that theme, I thought I'd share some older pictures of our Lego mechanics hard at work... mainly because I wish I could send a small army of minifigs out to fix our real car.  Wouldn't that be great?!

The One That Got Away

Over the course of about a week last Fall, Tyler and I played two sides of a jail escape in town.  I was the prisoner who broke out of jail and he was all the police trying to catch me.  We'd make measured moves each day (sort of like a chess game) and left video messages to each explaining what had happened.  It was kind of fun and quite unpredictable but the combined video messages aren't really good enough to share.  HOWEVER, the pictures tell the story pretty well and I thought you'd like seeing them.  So here's the story of how I ran from the police:

Take the Money and Run

One of the joys of having a large town and two kids who are camera savvy is that I find surprises quite often.  Depending on what's going on, I generally "empty" the various cards from our camera arsenal about twice a month.  Almost always I find interesting pictures on them that only the kids could have taken.   Today's sequence of pictures are from an ATM theft and police chase that Tyler set up and photographed.   I never saw this set up -- I only found the pictures over a week later, but the story speaks for itself:

Looks like today, crime DOES pay.  These guys are making a withdrawal.

CATZILLA ATTACKS!

Sophie is our cat.  She's so intent on being near us that whenever anyone enters the room where the Lego table is she promptly jumps up and finds someplace to watch us.   Most of the time this involves sitting on someone or something on the table (she prefers the smooth streets but those are typically crowded).  Naturally, this weird behavior has brought us a lot of fun.

Isle of Man... Sort of.

The annual Isle of Man Tourist Trophy motorcycle race is an incredible event featuring daredevil cyclists throwing their bikes and their bodies around turns and down straights with very little separating them from certain death.  Our Lego island has a somewhat smaller (in more ways than one) version of the event.

Zombies Don't Obey Traffic Laws

It's hard running a civilized town when the locals become zombies... made only worse by the well known fact that zombies don't stop for red lights.  Luckily for this unfortunate cab driver, the police are ready-- but ultimately our zombie friend still hasn't learned to follow traffic laws and does not use the crosswalk.

Police are chasing the stolen TechMan van when it runs a red light and gets hit by a taxi.