LEGO is the largest toy manufacturer in the world as measured by sales. So, what are they selling? The Danish-based company began making wooden toys in 1932. In 1949, they introduced cellulose acetate plastic “Automatic Binding Bricks.” A patent for the modern LEGO brick design was filed in 1958. By the early sixties, these bricks, now made of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) plastic, were sold across Europe and the United States. Hundreds of billions of these interlocking plastic bricks have been made since then—estimates range from 50 to 80 pieces for every single person on Earth.
Restructuring the basic idea of the product, LEGO introduced “play themes” with “minifigure” avatars in 1978. LEGO stores, movies, and LEGOLAND theme parks have since helped position the company as one of the hegemonic corporate empires, alongside Disney, of children’s material culture.
LEGO, writes design historian Colin Fanning, “is typically understood as a participant in the postwar discourse of the ‘good toy’—a class of largely abstract playthings that addressed middle-class notions of childhood creativity and the educational imperatives of play.” The very name of the family-owned company comes from the Danish phrase leg godt, meaning “play well.” The company has long stressed the universal appeal of their products, tying them to notions of children’s “innate creativity, invention, and individuality.” Fanning argues these specifically “bourgeois” notions have been “built upon larger ideological structures that undercut the company’s mythos of wholesome play and universality.”
“The company’s product, packaging, and advertising design have given concrete form to stereotypes of a racially unmarked European past, colonial encounters with the ‘uncivilized,’ and the gendering of domestic space and certain modes of play,” he argues.
The first “coherent play theme produced by LEGO presented a medieval world of castles, knights, and armed conflict.” Representations of feudal European history would become a “central pillar of LEGO production in the following decades, with the castle sets becoming more elaborate with each generation.” Subsequent play themes—Pirates, Islanders, Wild West, Adventurers—reinforced Eurocentric and colonial perspectives.
These also “created a thorny problem of representation on the level of race and ethnicity,” Fanning explains. LEGO’s “official stance on racial representation” was to make all their “minifigures” yellow. A 2008 company statement said the “figures were given the iconic yellow skin tone to reflect the non-specific and transcendental quality of a child’s imagination.”
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There were exceptions: licensed products meant that minifigure avatars of propriety characters were given the skin tone of the actors portraying them. Billy Dee Williams’s Lando Calrissian and Harrison Ford’s Han Solo of the Star Wars franchise are examples. Characters from The Simpsons used yellow as white-coding from the get-go, so their minifigures are yellow. But what Fanning calls the “ostensibly un-raced yellow” may not be so transcendent.
“[T]he tribal tattoos and grass skirts of Islanders minifigures,” he writes,
or the broad noses and face paint of Wild West minifigures representing Native Americans [are] visual markers of different from otherwise normative (therefore white-coded) minifigures…. [R]epresentations of Indigenous bodies were frequently paired with minifigures depicting the soldiers of colonizing powers—setting up hero-and-villain dynamics along racial lines.
The Bionicle series, launched in 2001, “explicitly mined the cultural heritage of the Māori of New Zealand”—until the Māori community pursued legal action to get the company to stop exploiting their culture.
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“The case of LEGO demonstrates how the same ideologies that shape the most obviously sexist and racist aspects of children’s culture can equally cloak themselves in claims of educative value and universality,” Fanning writes. For him, the company provides
a useful case study in how the spaces and playthings of childhood both reify and replicate the logics of patriarchy and Western hegemony—even when they attempt to construct a fictive universe unburdened from real histories of power and oppression.
Toys, even ones marketed as tools for the imagination, are never value neutral. At the same time, they don’t necessarily determine how children make meaning out of them. But toys are “co-producers” of meaning, and this meaning “occurs within ideological structures already ‘made for’ [children]—structures in turn commodified and reinforced by the commercial imperatives of a globalized toy industry.”
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