The LEGO Cam: When LEGO Gave Kids a Movie Studio

A sloth, a donkey, and a curious human. Send a prompt and see what they're doing. One hits a record with a question on his mind. Two brothers pick it up, see what they find. Corn takes his time, Herman's got the facts. Back and forth, they never hold back. My weird prompts, come on in, that's where we begin. My weird prompts, glad you're here.

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Last time we went through Meccano, and Daniel mentioned a card in there about the toy that came second. This week he's gone back to another one.

The Lego cam.

That's what he called it, and I'll admit, I had to have this one explained to me twice. He and a friend, back around 12 or 13, spent what felt like months moving minifigures a hair at a time and pressing the capture button. Computers were enormous, software crashed constantly, and there was a genuine personal vendetta from the machine against the work. The whole thing ended with a CD that they treated like a premiere.

Which, in fairness, was an achievement.

It was the whole achievement. That was the Oscar. So the question Daniel's asking is, what was this thing? How ambitious was it to hand children a full filmmaking studio in 2000? Why did it disappear? And how did the stop-motion hobby it accidentally started end up much bigger than the product ever was?

And the first answer is a beautiful contradiction, because if you look at the award shelf, this toy was a smash hit.

Toy of the year.

Toy of the year, an innovative toy of the year at the 2000 TOTY Awards. Two BAFTA Interactive Awards the same year, Best Interactive Children's and Best Interactive Learning. PC Magazine gave it five out of five and called it exemplary. Somewhere around $10 million in U.S. sales in the first year. And then the book on Lego's innovation, Brick by Brick, describes the international release as a flop, with retailers marking sets down to get them off the shelves.

Award-winning and commercially doomed at once.

Every manufacturer's nightmare and every historian's gift.

So what was in the box exactly? Set 1349.

442 pieces, seven minifigures, and one of those minifigures is Steven Spielberg. Complete with glasses, they listed that in the inventory. Plus a USB camera in a Lego housing, a dolly, a Steadicam rig, two studio lights, a fan, two small buildings, earthquake base plates, 10 flames, a vehicle, and two dinosaurs, a T-Rex and a baby one, plus a mechanical dinosaur foot. It's a Jurassic Park kit that happens to have a camera in it.

The San Diego scene. Okay.

They built it so kids could recreate the T-Rex attack on the trailers from The Lost World in miniature with their own hands on the camera. That's the pitch.

And the software side.

Joint project with Pinnacle Systems. It looked like a junior premiere or an iMovie with more knobs. Timeline, wipes, fades, titles, multiple audio tracks, a library of sound effects with the dinosaur roar and screeching tires, and you could dub tracks off a CD. For the year 2000, on a family PC that wasn't a toy-shaped feature set. That was a real editing suite.

Except the dinosaur roar arrived before the film it belonged to, since Jurassic Park 3 came out the year after.

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