Lego pop-up books

The first Lego pop-up book is primarily a Lego kit for Lego enthusiasts. The Lego company offered a space for enthusiasts to submit suggestions for kits and this pop-up was one suggestion that came to fruition. There are very many other videos on YouTube of Lego enthusiast in the process of having more ideas approved by the company. They've been working on them for years. It consists of two assemblies for different pop-up pages made out of Lego parts. In pop-up terms the pages are exceedingly rudimentary. In Lego kit terms the pages are awesome because they actually work as pop-up pages in a pop-up book made of Legos. First there is the book made of Lego pieces then there is a Little Red Riding Hood page with Lego pieces and characters, and Jack in the Beanstalk with its own pieces, two mechanisms and its own characters.

Several videos show this but none show it so well as a grown Lego enthusiast opening a new kit and assembling it from scratch, a man with an apparent Peter Pan complex with attention divided to two kittens. A boy enters the room near completion and his wife enters the house near the end. The kittens cause us to see his work area, a dining room apparently, his household and his back yard through the window.

Maybe the guy is a teenage son. I don't know. He calls the boy "bro" and calls the wife "mom."

Lego Ideas Pop-up Book 21315 Building Kit (859 pieces) $43.00 marked down from $70.00 a $27.00 savings on Amazon Prime free shipping.

The second Lego pop-up book is a proper pop-up on the subject of Legos company but made of stiff paper by pop-up genius Matthew Reinhart whose approach is to layer so many pop-up mechanisms onto each other that the final conglomeration of mechanisms all dependent upon the primary mechanism is nearly unworkable. He takes his creations to the limit of paper construction, right off the pages and into the air high as they can possibly go.

Whichever mechanisms are chosen for any pop-up book or card they usually result in large unused space on the pages. Robert Sabuda who was Matthew Reinhart's teacher pioneered inserting smaller sub-pop-ups in the area of the pages otherwise unused and requiring some kind of painted background. Often on both sides. Sometimes both top and bottom. We notice this plethora of pop-ups on each page distract children who often miss key elements. 

The first main mechanism on the first page is actually three separate main pop-ups built into each other. That's why the first mechanism does not look all that impressive. A car. A Lego car. The user lifts a tab forward and a new surface is pulled over the first to reveal an airplane. Then the user pulls a tab at the bottom of the whole page and that flips the entire mechanism backward and over to reveal another main mechanism under the original car that uses the bottom of the first mechanism that sits flat, as a side-wall for another new main mechanism entirely different from the first, in transformer fashion, and that sits at a 90° angle facing the viewer.

With more side-pop-up mechanisms as tiny books built into the corners around this conglomeration filling otherwise empty space. Any one of these side-mechanisms would make an excellent greeting card. There is a lot to be picked up from each page. On this one page Reinhart has layered three main mechanisms into each other, a feat that is unmatched by any other paper engineer, and he fills the otherwise blank spaces with other non-pop up alternate mechanisms that span the full range of possibilities seen in the pop-up world and he loads those with information about the Lego company and its history.

You can hit mute without missing anything. Nothing is explained.

Brilliant. Over the top, as usual. Surprisingly only $35.00 on Amazon. 112 ratings 5 stars average.

2% 1 star rating. Let's read them and see what these dopes say.

*  I must have read something wrong. I thought this was a pop up book. It is one pop up centerfold with multiple pull tabs giving history of Legos, etc, etc. Boring, unimaginative.

Gawl!

Ha ha ha ha ha ha. He missed the whole thing. This reviewer is blind.

Reinhart is giving the whole history of the Lego company from its inception to present day. How he assembled all this information is another indication of his genius and thoroughness. He does this by various means used in the pop-up world. Flip pages, pull out book, stacked pages, folded map pages, rotating wheels for example.

Usually an artist will draw one picture with a wheel behind a window and an edge of the wheel projecting outward from the pages to spin by using a thumb or a finger and containing several variations on the wheel that show through the window, variations of a head or perhaps lower for variations of shirts or blouses, arms and so forth, or lower for variations in legs. But Reinhart makes his Lego figure with three wheels and three windows to show variations of all three, head, trunk and legs. This is what makes Reinhart so extreme and this is exactly what the reviewer is missing and not appreciating because they don't pop up. The reviewer is spoiled and he's expecting additional pop-ups, things other pop-up books don't even have, but instead Reinhart is using non-pop up mechanisms to impart more Lego company information. The reviewer wants more pop-ups, not more Lego company information.

:-(

That's just one non-pop up side mechanism. Reinhart runs the entire gamut of available mechanisms. He has the whole world of pop-up mechanisms in this book, stacked upon each other. It's rich with pop-up ideas and rich with Lego company information. Just seeing this video we can see that the effort is quite extraordinary.

And we can also see this reviewer doesn't know what the f he is talking about.

Please Amazon, let there be another one.

Nope. No more one-star reviews for you!

Okay, to compensate for our 1-star review shortcoming, let's read the 2-star reviews. Maybe they're just as good. I mean bad. I mean good. I mean bad. I mean good.

2-star reviews.

* The pop-up workmanship and quality on this book are great, but it's full of the history of Legos. Very dull, totally uninteresting for a child, nor would few adults find it entertaining. Even the actually pop- ups are often uninteresting.

Point taken. But the pop-ups are not often uninteresting. They're extraordinary. They're stacked, they're layered, they're inserted inside one another, they're attached to each other. They're built up to extraordinary height such to exceed the width of the book. They leap into the air.

I don't like words in pop-up books either. The more words then the worse the pop-up book. That's my rule.

But as we see, Lego people are different. They're a different breed of human altogether. I never cared for Legos. I never got into that world. They were never my favorite toy. I actually never even cared for them. I didn't appreciate my friend's Lego sets. The things that were built were too clunky and too weird. I never cared about the fer'ner company in that weird Nordic land. Where their teutonic manner is to name a toy "Play Well."

The name of a toy is an imperative. That bossiness is in German blood.

"Yes, Mum, I vill. I vill play vell."

That's what Lego means to me. A nanny telling me to go in a corner and play well with my weird little bricks.

That sometimes stick so hard they cannot be pulled apart and other times cannot hold together. And with bumps all over the place so that nothing looks right, and no possibility for smoothness and with all surfaces wrong. They're not even bricks.

Still, people love them.

Millions of people do.

There is no denying they're a global phenomenon.

So get with the program and try to appreciate what the whole rest of the world already appreciates.

My problem with the book is the art is garish and I just don't like it. I don't like the toys so I'm inclined to not appreciate the book.

But I do appreciate Matthew Reinhart's comprehension and his execution and his enthusiasm and his mad genius. He touches the crap world of Legos and turns it to gold. The art is garish but it's also all-encompassing. He's showing the entire history of the Lego company. His work is a love letter to a toy manufacturer.

As layered pop-ups it's awesome.

The reviewer doesn't appreciate the extent of Reinhart's insanity. It's everything at once. The book is not just fugue, it's a fugue of fugues layered and interwoven in 3-dimensions in a format (books) intended for 2-dimensions.

Here is Reinhart remarking on the Lego Ideas Pop-up in which we see his own sincerity and his own appreciation and his sweetness. He is appreciating Lego people and their love for their peculiar toy. They make him happy.

Finally, a boy plays with Reinhart's Lego pop-up book. 

We see him at his parent's (possibly grandparent's) dining room table. Nicely appointed. Roses on the table. Very elegant. He's set up with a Go-Pro or some manner of recording that is extreme shaky-cam. We get glimpses of the dining room and adjoining room. This is a privileged little kid given a somewhat expensive book to go piss off with and stay out of trouble.

A parent checks him while he is showing us his book.

It's nearly impossible to follow. You'll be forgiven for giving up within just a few seconds. The boy is engrossed with the tiny side-mechanisms that are not actual pop-ups. He's enthralled with the Lego information. He misses entirely one of the three main mechanisms on the first page. We get only slap dash out-of-focus glimpses of what he is seeing. His narration is incomprehensible. His family distracts him. His camera goes blank several times. He's a mess. But he loves his new book. Even though he's appreciating only a portion of it. It's a whole world so far beyond him that it's not even funny. Reinhart completely overwhelmed him. 

This is how children play. This is their world. This is the boy getting what the 1 and 2-star reviewers don't get. This kid makes giving kids such gifts fun and worthwhile.