Lego Masters chat

The tribe has spoken (oops, wrong show) … ok, brick fans, here’s a thread for all your Lego Masters chat.

Today Mr 8 and I caught a repeat of last season’s time train episode and it was pretty cool, so perhaps we shall try the new season. And I do like Hamish Blake.
I have been in SA for a decade now and am still freaked out by people here calling it Lay-go instead of Leg-o.

How do you say it?

This Sunday (7pm on Nine): The third elimination hangs over the teams’ heads as they are challenged with building a 3D art piece out of Lego.

And on Monday st 7.30pm: In another elimination, the teams face two challenges. The first must be a story that lives above and below their tables, essentially telling two stories.



Facebooktwitterredditmail

46 Comments

  1. No, anybody who pronounces it “Lay-go” should be deported.

    I’m definitely enjoying season 2. Hamish is quite-capably straddling that line between funny and obnoxious, and I appreciate it. I think he’s a hoot, actually. My favourite challenge, so far, was the suspended Technic beam — those builds were gorgeous, and required such technical skill.

    I think the early favourites are Jackson and Alex, the two long-haired guys (and I’m still sure I know Jackson from somewhere, but I can’t think where), as well as Damien and the other fella (who’s name I can never remember).

  2. Leg-o for me. I had never heard anyone say Lay-go before.

    Funny thing, last night we played Dixit and there is a card that looks exactly like the white dome pulled out of the earth, which was in the suspended brick challenge. The person playing it said “masters”, and all who had seen the show picked the card correctly, the others were bewildered.

    Hamish: this show is my favourite rendition of his humour. As you say, perfect blend, and I love the rapport with Brick Man. Brick Man has some comedy skills too.

  3. Interesting.
    But not as interesting as some previous episodes. I’m not sure that some of the contestants “got it” and probably adapted based on watching some of the others.
    There are five teams left before tonight’s elimination. Surely that means it’s all over in 2 weeks?

  4. Another fabulous concept episode. I loved the idea of the 3D paintings.

    The Venus fly-trap was an amazing build, and I’m with Brickman on the bull and cowboy, that was so clever.

    I thought Jay and Stani’s painting was quite lovely (how they used different colours to make the light and shadow effect was really cool), but it just wasn’t 3D enough and they were eliminated. I liked Jodie’s octopus a lot less, to be honest, but the pirate ship *was* slightly-more three dimensional.

    Tomorrow night, they’re building above and below a table surface, which looks super-cool.

  5. These people are all so nice.
    The best builds tonight were head and shoulders above the rest, and the losing build was fairly obvious.
    The show continues to be fair. No favourites.
    I wish we could say the same for MC.
    I am looking forward to tomorrow night. It looks like it will be more interesting.

  6. Loved the bucking cowboy on the riding bull coming out of the picture. Deserved winner.
    Thought the boys who did the New York scene were harshly judged. If only they made the taxi bigger and coming out of the picture, they would have been safe. That pirate picture was a holy mess. Terrible.

    I like that the teams seem to genuinely care about each other. Great show. Nerds rule!

    • “That pirate picture was a holy mess. Terrible.”

      Agreed. I feel like they’re slightly hesitant to eliminate Jen and Jodie, otherwise the show would become just one big boy’s club (with all the other all-female teams eliminated early).

      But, like I said upthread, I quite liked the New York scene.

      • I thought that, too, about Jen and Jodie. They are good builders, but I think they have limited scope, and I expect that they won’t be in the final three.

  7. Ironic that we get our own thread just in time for the least interesting episode.

    Actually, I still loved it, and laughed out loud, it just seemed like an easier build than the previous ones. I agree with the rankings that everyone else has given. The pirate ship was the only one where the picture looked wrong, but I see why the streetscape did not get through. When they were planning it, I thought that they could do the same thing but with the side buildings coming forward, as if you were looking down the street past the houses. Oh well. A pity because that team were quite good, and also entertaining. I loved the answer to “what would be your worst nightmare for a build?” – “…a self-portrait!”.

    It seems to me that Trent (curly dark hair) has a TV presence and I could see him falling into a hosting role sometime.

    I like the viewer choice gimmick too. Mostly, the response is what you would expect as the most popular, but of course, Brick Man has to consider technical and quality aspects too in his judging.

    At the moment, this is the only show I am arranging my life around. And it is the only show that everyone in the house is sitting together to watch.

  8. So the big twist at the end of the episode rendered the whole episode kind of pointless?

    Okay, fair enough. For the record, I thought that — once again — Jay and Stani’s build (that beautiful Gameboy) was superior to the girls’ model, but anyway.

    As for the rest of the competition … Alex and Jackson’s build was sublime. I loved it. I want one of those little 50s diners in my own Lego city. I really think we might as well just give them the prize money now, and be done with it.

    I really liked the farmer/rabbit fighting over the carrot. Yes, the scale was off … but having the rabbit almost as large as the farmer worked with the cartoon-y nature of the scene. It the context of what it was, it was brilliant.

    I really liked the married couple’s underground exploration build, too. They really should’ve hung the pterodactyl further forward, though.

    Honestly, I didn’t care for the Christmas display, and I think Andrew and Damian were very lucky that the beach-scene didn’t get them eliminated. Yeah, it was a great build, but they missed the brief just as much as Jay and Stani misse the 3D brief, last night, that got *them* eliminated (tonight’s extra challenge notwithstanding).

    As an aside, I’m glad they finally brought Jordy back. Listening to him (“You guys have iPads? We didn’t have those last year!”) was hilarious.

  9. I enjoyed this episode.
    The problem with the girls is that one of them is so much stronger than the other. The not-engineer is just a grunt. It makes them difficult to judge.
    I liked the second chance for yesterday’s eliminated team. Firstly, it was a bit of a 50/50 call that they went home at all, so second chance and extra, extra fair. And secondly, an extra episode to the series is now on the cards. Yay!
    The final two are becoming clearer and clearer. It’s just a sorting exercise from here. I can’t wait for the finale. It should be a doozie.

    • Yeah, I really think the final two are a given, at this point.

      But still, the standard of skills is pretty high across the board, so they all deserve to be there.

  10. Gee, LEGO Masters is such an entertaining show. Andrew and Damien should have played their golden brick and kept Jordy for a later round. They were very lucky not to be eliminated. Their figures were out of scale and really missed the brief.

    How good were the two finalists. I loved the farmer and the rabbit and Trent is good value.
    Also liked the worm coming out of the ground into the 50’s town. These two teams are the stand out builders.
    Looking forward to the Star Wars episode on Sunday.

    • I am such a fan of the Star Wars concept that I thought they would save it for the finale.
      Now I can’t image what they will build.

  11. Agree with all above. My favourite moment was Hamish starting the serious discussion, then the camera panning out to show Trent in the conversation, BM pushing him out, then Hamish tying it back to “wow, same size, same scale…”. LMHO.

    Not so fussed about Star Wars to come. Big disadvantage if any of them have as little knowledge (or interest) about it as I do. Unlike the food shows, I like that mostly they get to choose a theme that they know about. It is the technical skill that is set by the judge. Setting Star Wars could be the equivalent of making them recreate a scene from a Jane Austen novel.

  12. The nerd episode tonight.

    No, but seriously, I think I know those Storm-troopers.

    Hamish seems like he’s having an absolutely ball, tonight. In fact, so do most of the teams.

    Except the husband and his decidedly-not-nerdy wife. I don’t see this ending well.

  13. I will say, the episode is interesting to me, as a long-term Lego fan.

    (and not just because, why didn’t they air it, last Monday, when it was May the 4th, which is International Star Wars Day, and yes, that’s a thing)

    Lego used to have “Space” as one of it’s classic themes, but once they purchased the licence for Star Wars merch, “Space” isn’t a theme they bother with much, anymore. This episode seems, to me, to be about building a giant awesome spaceship, but the Star Wars realm is how the company approaches space and soft science-fiction, so everything has to be filtered through the Force. It’s a shame, and if I was a more cynical man, I’d suggest that Star Wars sets allow Lego to charge more, for sets, knowing full well that fans will gobble them up and pay extra.

    • Maybe it was intended for May 4, but when they changed the schedule to make it last longer, the date got mucked up?

  14. I’m sure I heard somewhere that Star Wars was behind the revival of LEGO. I’m sure they nearly went broke before that.
    That’s why I don’t get that the wife is so clueless. Surely doing some research would have been part of basic preparation for this show.
    And besides, we have all absorbed the story, whether we wanted to or not.

    • It’s a column (a), column (b) situation.

      At the end of the 90s, Lego *was* in serious financial strife. One of the things they did was start buying licences to other toy franchises. Harry Potter and Star Wars were the first two themes to come out, and they were immensely profitable. It wasn’t just them (in the early 00s, Lego did quite a few things differently), but it helped.

      In the late 90s, Lego fired a lot of their old designers and hired new ones. The new people had *no* idea what the company was about and what they should’ve been doing, and the whole company suffered because of it. Reading the old catalogues, you can almost see the point where they completely forgot the point of their own business. It was a bizarre time to be a fan.

      They spent most of the 00s clawing themselves out of near-bankruptcy.

      • So, WS, where in the history did the invention of Duplo happen? We have huge amounts of that in our house, and it pulled us into Lego because you could have it with little kids (not a choking hazard). For me, Duplo revived my interest. Was it a successful addition to hook kids in at earlier ages?

        • Oh no, Duplo isn’t a new thing. I had Duplo train sets in the early 80s when I was a kid. Duplo has been a part of Lego’s catalogue for decades.

    • I really identified with the wife (does she have a name?) last night. Even though she is not really someone who would be a BFF for me, I agreed with everything she said.

      But you are right, the difference is that I don’t do Lego or Star Wars, whereas she should have at least an inkling that the Star Wars kits are a huge genre of Lego, and therefore prepare a bit.

  15. Well that was fun. I enjoyed that.
    So far, I am mostly agreeing with the judging.
    I’m expecting to enjoy tomorrow night more.

  16. Well, for a Star Wars disliker, I loved that episode. Maybe that is the secret of Lego – that it doesn’t matter what the subject matter is, the fun is in the creativity. Just seeing the passion everyone had was so entertaining. And the final products were magic, every one of them. I am in awe of their imaginations and creativity, as well as the skill.

    And I was thinking last night, this must be one of the very few competition shows where the contestants are ordinary. No plastic surgery, no fancy immodest dresses or silly hairstyles. In fact, some of this bunch are decidedly on the lower end of the appearance spectrum, yet where the world might rank them down, I just love them. Who needs perfect plumped lips when you have eyes sparkling with excitement, magic hand building skills, compassion to your competitors (so that you run to help when needed), and faces that light up the room. Pure joy.

    I really must learn their names properly.

    Andrew & Damien, Jackson & Alex, husband and wife, the girls, Trent and school chaplain….

  17. Another fabulous episode.
    Dannii was doing my head in with her complete absence of Star Wars knowledge. I guess being a Sci Fi nerd I love the original Star Wars trilogy.

    Trent and Hamish were having so much fun. I loved the Dark side troop carrier that Alex and Jackson build. That was my absolute favourite.

    Ordinary people creating and building extraordinary LEGO builds. What’s not to love.
    Channel 9 should offer Trent a trio hosting position with Hamish and Brickmam for next season.

  18. Tonight’s episode is just plain fun.
    I am starting to think that the difference between this show and “others” is that the contestants are clever. Hamish may have the jokes but the teams give as good as they get. I suppose that’s exhaustion plays a part.

  19. I think Brickman absolutely made the right call tonight. It’ll be a shame to lose the girls, but their model was not only poorly-weighted (and nearly capsized when it was lowered into the water), but it significantly broke apart as it descended (far more than the other three). It looked great, as a build, but it was definitely the weakest model. And I think, when Brickman was telling them how proud he was, of them? That was the moment when you knew, yep, they were done.

    I love how the newlyweds incorporated swordfish into their build so the pirate could be having a sword duel, with the octopus watching on.

    And boy, Trent and Josh got lucky that the squid stayed anchored to the base.

  20. Tonight’s episode was great.
    Loved all the builds but you knew the girls were out of their depth. The face and body of the mermaid looked weird and parts broke off the build. They had fun though and enjoyed the process.

    Loved the squid, the crab and the octopus. Finals week is going to be epic.

  21. I have to admit, that was kind of a lackluster episode, tonight.

    I liked the first challenge (and didn’t they all look horrified, when Hamish knocked over the motorcycle), where they had to come up with something amazing just from the bricks they could salvage from the destroyed bike.

    But the second challenge? You had that beautiful city (gosh, I envy the production assistants who put that together) with spots for four amazing additions to the skyline … and two of them (a full half) were really underwhelming. One team ran out of time and their haunted house looked bad, and the newlyweds were relying on a gimmick that they couldn’t test beforehand (Brickman actually lectured them about this in a past episode, which is why I don’t have too much sympathy for them) that failed them and got them eliminated.

    • My thoughts pretty much spot on. Still enjoyed it, but the second part felt like it should have been at the start of the season and not the penultimate episode.

      Of course, the viewers knew what was happening to the bike (from the ads) but I though Hamish acted it out very cleverly.

  22. I missed last night’s episode And I won’t be able to see the replay.
    I am pleased to hear that I didn’t miss anything.
    I am also pleased to hear that the newly weds have been sent home. They were a bit marginal. I am not sure where the weakness in their pairing lay but it meant that they always seems to be just falling over the line.

    • It was a surprising let-down.

      The first challenge saw Hamish (spectacularly) destroying a life-size Lego model of a Harley Davidson, and the teams had to grab as many pieces as they could, and only build a model from what they grabbed. Trent and Josh won with a, honestly, hilarious model of a guy in a chicken costume stealing eggs from a little Lego hen-house.

      That got them an advantage for the next round (which was an elimination). There was a city, and Trent/Josh had the power to allocate where the other teams could build. Andrew and Damian built a lovely European-style museum (which was the victim of a jewel heist by a team of robbers), and Alex and Jackson built a giant skyscraper (Evil Corporate Inc, or something, with the police and a spy raiding the building and arresting people).

      Meanwhile, Trent and Josh wasted 5 hours (of a 12 hour build) with no clue what they were doing (and it badly showed. Their haunted house build was severely lacking) and the newlyweds built a government warehouse that was actually the site of an alien attack. They spent a long time designing a gimmick that would see a UFO fly out of the warehouse and destroy the roof … but they spent so long on that, that the rest of the build was boring and careless.

      And the gimmick (that they didn’t even test beforehand) didn’t even work when it was time to judge it. Trent and Josh got lucky, but the weakest build (out of two pretty weak builds) was sent home.

  23. It was a bit of a cliff-hanger. I was still convinced, right up until the moment of elimination, that the UFO would jump out, even though BM said it was stuck. Shows how conditioned I am to competition show fake-outs!

    Out of the two teams who stuffed up, I was very firmly on the boy’s team. For this build alone, you would have to say it was pretty even for faults, and BM was exactly right to say that only the UFO could save the couple, and only a UFO failure would save the boys. We were saying the same in our loungeroom. But based on performance throughout the season, the boys were head-and-shoulders above Tim and Dannii (she was learning technic stuff as she went). Therefore, all else being equal, T & D should have been the ones eliminated.

    Yet, competition shows don’t work like that, and a “bad day” has sent many a champion “home”, so I was fully prepared to say goodbye to Trent & Josh. That said, I think they are weaker than Andrew/Damian and Jackson/Alex generally and that it will be one of those two to win.

    On current form, I would have to say J & A are the favourites, but A & D are close enough that they could do it with one of their best builds.

    Bring on tonight!

    • I am so proud of you for learning everyone’s names. No matter how much I try, it doesn’t stick. Insert clappy hands here.

  24. Oh, forgot to say I loved Hamish’s little dog-hand-and-foot man. That’s my level of competence, right there.

  25. So, ultimately? I feel like the winners were never in doubt, and I thought that since episode 1.

    The Franken-fig, Victorian-era village under siege was just sublime, it was amazing. The detail they put into the build was amazing (I couldn’t get over the stain-glass windows on the church), and the technical skill with the gigantic monster was everything that the newlyweds messed up, so badly, last night.

    Well done boys.

    It was another good season. All three builds were pretty amazing, and I would’ve been happy with any victory, but yeah, I think the right team won. Gosh, to see it in person would be incredible.

  26. I am proud to say I picked it before they started the finale. The boys have always had a story telling ability that the other teams lacked.
    And then the moment they started to incorporate moving parts, and the others didn’t, I knew they were home and hosed – in spite of what the editing was trying to portray.
    Just building big was never going to cut it. Why on earth did they not at least put in some flashing lights? Minimum.
    I still loved the episode. I love this show. All the contestants are nice people. Love Brickman and Hamish. And the editing was gentle and seamless. Praise to the producers, for a change.
    There was not much to complain about, except possibly that the season is too short, or that we are going to have to wait a long time before the next outing.
    What now?

  27. Fantastic ending to a great series. 28 hours, for goodness sake. I would be in the corner napping.

    I felt that either the franken-fig or stadium could win. Personally I would have given it to the stadium, because of the chaos of the f-f one whereas the stadium was “restful” to look at. It had white space, like on a typed paged, that made the story stand out so well. Having said that, I agreed with BM that the knight wasn’t quite right.

    I think the difference was that when you could be there in person to see Jackson and Alex’s creation, you would be able to focus down on the detail. And of course it had movement which neither of the other two did. I think viewing it on TV didn’t do it the justice it deserved. The stadium was better for TV. So, it is not surprising that f-f won, with all the voting onsite.

    I, too, would like a longer season, but not too much. That was one of the problems with MKR, it went too far with length. LM could do with maybe one or two more weeks.

    Then again, isn’t it a thing to leave ’em wanting more?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *