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The phrase “Lego Spinal Tap” is perhaps the most promising uttered in the English language since “reclining chair,” right? Well, not if you are stinky LEGO.

Okay, let’s back up a bit. It seems that a few years ago a teenager named Coleman Hickey made a stop motion video of Tap’s “Tonight We’re Gonna Rock You Tonight” using Legos. Luckily, the surviving members of the band realized that this was all that was holy under the sun and wanted to include the video on a new concert DVD, the NY Times reports. But the LEGO Company would not allow this.


As final editing was being done on a concert DVD of the tour, which included footage from the video projected on stage, Lego declined to grant permission to use its figures, which are protected by copyright.

“We love that our fans are so passionate and so creative with our products,” said Julie Stern, a spokeswoman for Lego Systems, the United States division of the Lego Group, a Danish company founded in the 1930s. “But it had some inappropriate language, and the tone wasn’t appropriate for our target audience of kids 6 to 12.”


We fail to see how the lyrics “You’re hot, you take all we got, not a dry seat in the house, Next day, we’ll be on our way,” is not targeted at a juvenile audience, but whatevs.

Besides, it turns out LEGO has bigger trademark protection fish to lightly bread and then broil, because, with the creative, outside the box genius that is Hollywood in this day and age THEY ARE GOING TO MAKE A LEGO MOVIE at Warners.

Scribes Dan and Kevin Hageman are penning the script for the family comedy that will mix live action and animation. Warners is keeping the plot tightly under wraps, but it’s described as an action adventure set in a Lego world.


According to the article, many around Tinseltown had longed to make a LEGO movie for years, but the Danish parent company could never find a storyline they liked. But now they’ve licked that problem.

But the company sparked to Lin and the Hageman brothers’ embrace of core values Lego wanted to include in a film, especially “a fun factor, creativity and that imagination has no boundaries,” Lin told Daily Variety. The film’s been in development for more than a year, with the scribes and producers making several trips to Denmark to work with Lego’s execs on the concept.


In keeping with the theme of “imagination having no boundaries”, we can imagine this movie very well, esp. in the hour long scene in which the kids, Tyler and Madison, desperately try to find a missing axle component that rolled under the sofa, or the one where parents stumble over Legos strewn over the floor, cursing their sharp corners on their bare feet. Or the scene, switching to CGI Lego Land™ when a Lego Guy™ walks out of a gas station and discovers that his hand is permanently grafted into a “c” shape and the kids must go on a mystical quest to free him to make other hand shapes. And the quest just happens to involve going to see a Lego Spinal Tap concert. That’s what WE’D like to see.
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1 COMMENT

  1. Wait a minute… Monty Python can make a LEGO video of “Knights of the Round Table”, but Spinal Tap can’t make a music video? Okay… “Holy Grail” is rated PG (no, seriously…) and Tap is R. But is Monty Python appropriate for kids 6 to 12?

    Back before LEGO licensed all sorts of properties (back when we used space legos to play Star Wars) back when they rarely advertised on television, there was a commercial of a LEGO cat and mouse engaged in a wizards’ duel, where each animal kept morphing into other things. Google: Lego Kipper

  2. Surviving members of the band ; )

    Monty Python IS appropriate for American kids ages 6-12 because they can’t bloody understand all the bad words.