Rule 35: If It Exists, It Exists in LEGO
LEGO in 2024 is entirely different from LEGO in the twentieth century, and the biggest difference is that Adult Fans of LEGO (AFOLs) on Instagram are making sure there is a LEGO version of everything.
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Introduction
One of the reasons Retro has a Toys section that is significantly focused on LEGO, and one of the reasons that I even now consider the name of that section something of a misnomer, is that LEGO is today more properly understood as a medium than a “toy.”
If I were to tell you that anything a human being can do, a human being has at some point been photographed and/or videotaped doing, you’d probably more or less accept that premise. But I’d contend that the same is true for the most popular brick-building brand in the history of humankind: if a human being has conceived of a thing, another person has at some point conceived of recreating that thing using LEGO as a medium.
The examples of this are legion, in the same sense that the more controversial and prurient maxim known as Rule 34 is easily proven (Rule 34 originated from a 2003 webcomic which was captioned, “Rule #34: There is porn of it. No exceptions.”; Peter Morley-Souter drew the webcomic to express his shock at seeing parodic Calvin and Hobbes pornography).
Needless to say, the here-proposed “Rule 35”—if it exists, it exists in LEGO—is aided by the massive advances in AI we’ve seen in just the last few years. Consider the video below:
Chernobyl, The Great Depression, the American Civil War—these days all you have to do is type a phrase and “LEGO” into an AI image generator and you’ll get an example of how any historical event or phenomenon or product would look in LEGO.
My interest here is a little bit different, though. I want to prove Rule 35 by looking for actual brick-built sets that exist in the world. Rule 35 isn’t much of a rule, needless to say, if it depends on AI; either LEGO is a ubiquitous medium for our species or it is not, and AI should really have nothing to do with answering that question. Agreed?
So with that in mind, I thought I would provide some examples of Rule 35 by way of running a live test of it. What do I mean by “live”? Well, see the list of rules, below.
The Rules
The rules, fortunately, are very simple:
I conjure in my mind a real or fictive event that has become part of our collective consciousness as Americans, in real time and without using the internet; and then
I search Google, Instagram, and any other relevant website to see if that event has been depicted in LEGO; and then
I report my results here (i.e., below).
Again, I will pick the events without any foreknowledge of whether they’ve ever been depicted in LEGO.
To be very clear, people do not build LEGO dioramas of serious historical events to make light of those events. Those who create LEGO installations of size and scope almost always do so because LEGO is simply the artistic medium they use instead of other alternatives (e.g., paint, clay, 3D modeling, dance, et al.). With this in mind, please understand that the inclusion of an event below isn’t an attempt to minimize the event but the opposite: to show that any event that has (justifiably) captured the imagination of the American polis has thereafter been memorialized in LEGO bricks.
Okay, let’s begin.
The Test: Ten Attempts
(1) The crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
Result:
(2) The November 5th, 1605 “Gunpowder Plot.”
Result:
(3) The Attempted Assassination of Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley Jr.
Result:
(4) The Mass Murder of Jews at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland
Result:
(5) The Earthquake During the 1989 Major League Baseball World Series in San Francisco (the “Loma Prieta Quake”)
Result (a simulation, using LEGO bricks and conducted in San Francisco, showing how some buildings in San Francisco survived the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989):
(6) The Salem (Massachusetts) “Witch Trials” of the 1600s
Result (in which I learn that there’s a massive effort underway, for some reason, to use AI to “build” a LEGO set depicting the Salem “witch trials,” of which the image below is just one byproduct, meaning that yes it is AI for now but this is the beginning of a real-world building project):
And in fact this historical event has already been depicted in actual LEGO, too—with my apologies to readers of Retro for the slightly graphic, upsetting image:
(7) The Film Boogie Nights
Result:
(8) September 11, 2001
Result:
(9) The Crowing of Queen Elizabeth in 1953
Result:
(10) The Frog and Toad Children’s Books
Result:
Conclusion
Well, Rule 35 withstood this—essentially randomized—scrutiny. I’m sure some will wonder what would happen if I selected more commonplace (but therefore also far harder to Google for) human activities, like, say, bungee jumping, skeet shooting, and lovers trying out positions from the Kama Sutra, all of which I found even easier than the photographs above even though I just thought of them as I wrote this and had no idea if they existed in LEGO or not (though under Rule 35, I realized that they must).
There were too many LEGO Kama Sutra photos to post here, so I just selected a few:
The purpose of all this has not been to show that adults use children’s toys to depict adult scenes—though that’s true, and sometimes both upsetting and deeply offputting—but rather that LEGO has become a medium of expression as essential to human art as almost any other.
Just as we would instantly accept that any event in the public consciousness has been painted, photographed, and videotaped—to the extent that that last technology was extant at the relevant time—we must also accept that LEGO use is now so ubiquitous among Western adults that it exists as a ready medium for any type of self-expression you could possibly imagine.
Thus I give to you: Rule 35.
Coda
As I was doing my last edit of this article, I came across on Instagram a LEGO version of the recent Instagram meme in which people roll bottles down a set of hard stairs to see which ones break the quickest and how they break. This too has made it to LEGO!
The LEGO version of Dark Tourism.