When Lego announced earlier this year that it would be releasing a series of Simpsons minifigures, most fans of the show (or of Legos) figured they'd just be putting Homer or Apu or Nelson Muntz in a generic brick-based environment, or recreating a scene from the Lego episode of the show, or maybe just sticking them on a keychain.
Not Matt De Lanoy.
The 36-year-old graphic designer has been heavy into Lego design ever since the first Star Wars sets were released in 1999, and has been designing and building his own creations since 2004. He even made a massive Lego version of *Futurama'*s New New York last year, so taking on another Matt Groening animated show required no deliberation—"I knew I would have to build Springfield," he says. And so he did.
De Lanoy started with the Android's Dungeon (where Comic Book Guy works) in January, and made Krusty Burger in March; by mid-June, many thousands of bricks later, he had finished the gargantuan set he calls Lego Springfield. Don't ask for an exact count, though. "If I know how many pieces there are," he says, "then I could get a rough estimate of how much money I've put into the project—and if I knew that, it might stop me from building before I've even begun." (He will say, however, that he has north of 500,000 bricks and buys more at least once a week.)
Of course, after 25 seasons, The Simpsons has featured more buildings than even this massive installation could include "The first thing I did was consider what the most memorable buildings of the town are," says De Lanoy, who lives near Chicago. "I didn't want to get too obscure, because when people see the layout I want them to be able to recognize the landmarks, even if they're just casual fans." He knew he wanted the whole layout to be 10 feet by five feet, and he was recycling the roads from his Futurama project, so he determined the footprints of the buildings based on those constants.
Like so many thirtysomething fans of The Simpsons' heyday, De Lanoy admits he hasn't watched a new episode of the show in "well over a decade," but he cites "Marge vs. the Monorail" and "Homer the Great" (aka The Stonecutters Episode) as favorites. Indeed, the Stonecutter temple is a fixture of his Lego Springfield, though it was a late addition. "I had considered the Courthouse, Burns' Manor, and the Mafia's hideout," he says, "but I really couldn't work them in well." He'd originally wanted to create a working Escalator to Nowhere in time to display it at a regional Brickworld convention, but "due to time constraints, and knowing my very limited abilities with technical building, I opted to build the Stonecutters instead. I still hope to build that one, though."
While Lego released a prepackaged kit for the Simpsons' House in May, De Lanoy found himself unable to use it. "It was too big to fit!" he says. Besides, the kit version of 742 Evergreen Terrace was missing the bedroom area over the garage—so he designed his own version. He does cop to using the car from the kit, but had to redesign the roof (the kit version had a sunroof so Marge's hair could poke through). Other than that, and some vehicles taken from recent sets based on The Lego Movie, everything is bespoke—or bebrick, rather. And yes, that means even Ned Flanders' Geo.
Animation isn't the only target of De Lanoy's re-creations. He's also done scenes from Phantom of the Opera, Super Mario 64, even the beloved cast of Team Fortress 2. But the next big project on his list might just eclipse everything else. "I have two ideas I'm considering for next year's Brickworld Chicago," he says, "one of which would be based on Back to the Future." He won't start working on that until early next year, but one thing's certain: where he's going, he won't need instructions.
