Legonauts


 * Who are the LEGOnauts?

LEGOnauts are LEGO astronauts of course, but they're hardly quality actors. They're cute, but smiling and mindless autonomons with no individual character. The new LEGO sets have certainly addressed this problem, and you can now purchase minifigs who aren't smiley drones, come in sexes, and even sport coarse stubble. The old sets I had in the Eighties had to rely on a lot of character from some editing slights of hand than relying on them to method act.during the production scraping their isotype faces off with a scalpel and replacing them with a Rotring inked version.

All the Portal characters are simple identical clones of each other (colours notwithstanding) and used the same facial heads. Character was distinguished by some heads being more frequently worn by a figure than others. There would be one or two signature expressions that a particular character wore more than others. Having special heads was all very nice and made the little guys look alive, but it was oh so painful to shoot at times. Within the space ship interiors, even a simple blink involved ripping apart the set, gingerly replacing a head without moving the character and then rebuilding everything around it all over again.