Posted on 04 November 2011, 6:37

Since we’re now in the season of the church year when Last Things are on the menu, here’s an interesting take on the apocalypse which I read about on the wonderful BoingBoing site. I hadn’t realised that serious Lego enthusiasts have been creating post-end of the world scenes for several years using the world’s favourite Danish plastic bricks.

Following in the footsteps of Mad Max and other post-apocalypse movies, the Lego creations feature shattered highways and buildings, and heavily armed groups of plastic figures trying to lash together their own shanty-style refuges in a newly hostile world.

That sounds bleak, but the best brick-built creations are full of ingenious and humorous detail as they try to capture life after The End, however it’s come about: nuclear exchange, pandemic, global meltdown, alien invasion, zombie attack… take your pick. I haven’t yet found any Lego creations modelled on the Rapture or the Great Tribulation of fundamentalist theology, but they must be out there.

BoingBoing recommends the work of Kevin ‘Crimson Wolf’ Fedde for sheer ingenuity (that’s his piece in the picture above).

A group on Flickr, ApocaLego, has over 1,000 members who post pictures of their best end-of-civilisation scenes. They ran a contest in 2008 called ‘Picking up the pieces: the world has ended, but hey, life goes on’. The blurb gives an idea of the mood of the whole genre: ‘The key to the contest is that the post-apocalyptic survivors should be actively building/creating something important to their continued survival. What a refreshing change from the usual gloom and doom!’