I remember the first time I saw the modern LEGO minifigs – it was September 1978, and my parent got me the Space Cruiser set (the first of many space themed LEGO sets). I loved the idea that you could actually pose these figures, have them fight, dance, and travel through your imagination.
The LEGO(R) minifigure was first manufactured and packed into a LEGO set the morning of August 25, 1978. Children of all ages and LEGO employees around the world today commemorated the milestone by kicking off Go Miniman Go!, a movement that aims to inspire generations of LEGO children to reconnect with the adventures their minifigures enabled them to live through creative, constructive LEGO play.
Take the jump for some interesting facts about our little 2-inch friends.
Interesting facts about the minifigure include:
- Minifigures represent the world’s largest population, more than 4 billion people strong, making it 3 times larger than China, 12 times larger than the United States and 120 times larger than Canada.
- Globally, 3.9 minifigures are sold per second, 365 days per year. That’s an average of over 122 million per year!
- There are more than 8 quadrillion (8,181,068,395,500,000) possible combinations of minifigures that can be made using all of the unique parts over the last 30 years.
- Film stars and comic heroes started to appear as minifigures in 1998 with LEGO Star Wars(TM); only two real people have been represented in minifigure form multiple times (Answer found on http://www.gominimango.com/)
- The standard minifigure is four LEGO bricks tall and has just over 970 degrees of movement.
Happy 30th Birthday LEGO Minifig – now I feel old that I’ve been around this long… Oh, and I was going through the Major Spoilers Toy Closet of Doom the other day, and discovered I still have that very first LEGO Space set complete with the original figures. Oh, and I know one of the real people made to minifig form is Steven Spielberg, but don’t know the other off the top of my head.
