Painting this LEGO portrait series has really made me get LEGOs on the brain.
When we were children, my siblings and I had tons and tons of LEGOs which we played with almost daily. We had a small core set of main characters, and tons of peripheral characters. As you may have guessed, our “main characters” were mostly just Minifigs that my siblings and I had assembled to best resemble ourselves.
And this point is what lead to the hair outbreak: back in the day, LEGO had a very limited selection of hair for Minifigs. Being of mostly Danish ancestry, my brood of siblings 1,000 young consisted of roughly 700 blonde girls. Some of them were very dissappointed that they couldn’t make a blonde Minifig, so my mom actually called LEGO to complain.
“You are a Danish company!” She said into the telephone receiver, “How can you not have blonde hairs for LEGOs?”
This actually happened.
“We do have blond hairs!” They told her.
“Well, I don’t know where to buy them, my kids want to make LEGOs that look like themselves, but we don’t have any blonde LEGO hairs.”
“We will send you some free blond LEGO hairs!”
Of course the kids were super excited, blonde LEGO Minifig hairs? This was the first we had heard of it! And we had purchased tons and tons of LEGO sets. The closest thing we had up to this point was a Luke Skywalker Minifig that had very recently been released. We had bought that, of course, but it was a boy-hair and we only had a couple of them. Apart from making the main characters resemble ourselves, we were excitedly imagining all the new peripheral characters we could make with the hair.
When that most-eagerly awaited parcel arrived, we opened it up to find… 50 Luke hairs. Of course we were disappointed, but we also laughed for several hours at how many Luke hairs we now had.
Soon, a Luke Hair epidemic broke out in our LEGO town. The townsfolk that contracted this disease awoke to find that their hair had turned into Luke Hair. This disease raged for about a week until LEGO doctors found a cure, and everybody had their hair restored.
Some of my siblings gave their Minifigs the Luke hairs and insisted that “some girls cut their hair like this,” while others kept the long black or brown hairs on their Minifigs. We would have to wait another year or so before LEGO got really crazy with the licensed characters, and released both blonde and red Minifig hair. And in all sorts of styles, to boot.
