The Jackie Robinson of Legoland, with Wyatt Cenac

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: "The Jackie Robinson of Legoland, with Wyatt Cenac"

Podcast: Pablo Torre Finds Out
Host: Pablo Torre
Guest: Wyatt Cenac
Date: May 30, 2024

---

Overview

This episode digs deep into the cultural, racial, and philosophical implications behind LEGO minifigures—those iconic little yellow plastic people. Joined by Emmy-winning comedian Wyatt Cenac, Pablo Torre investigates the seemingly “race-neutral” history of LEGO, how the company's choices reflect (and shape) attitudes about diversity, and the ways fans and corporations alike struggle with representing race in toy form. Along the way, the discussion veers from childhood nostalgia, NBA players’ love for LEGO, and the curious existence of yellow-skinned minifigures, to the arrival of Black characters in LEGO’s world, culminating in a reflection on how a company aimed at educating children can’t ultimately avoid the real world’s complexities.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. LEGO Mania and Personal Connection ([00:33]–[04:23])

• Pablo and Wyatt riff on their (and their children’s) obsession with LEGO, with Pablo joking about "research" consisting of assembling toys for his daughter.
• NBA stars like Victor Wembanyama and Miles Turner are cited as adult LEGO enthusiasts; the “play vs. build” debate emerges as a matter of self-perception and legitimacy.

Notable Quote:

"I build Legos, I don't play with Legos. But second of all, yeah, all the time."
—Miles Turner on his LEGO habit (paraphrased by Pablo and Wyatt) [04:23]

---

2. The Yellow Minifigure & Race-Neutral Ideals ([04:27]–[10:10])

• Wyatt describes his realization, especially after watching The LEGO Movie, that the yellow color of LEGO minifigures was intended as race-neutral—but struggles surface when the company starts to differentiate.
• The hosts compare LEGO’s stance to The Simpsons, noting that yellow is constructed as neutral only up to a point.
• The irony and problematic aspects of yellow as a “neutral” color emerge, especially with LEGO’s use in specific cultural sets (e.g., Chinese New Year).

Notable Quote:

"We chose yellow to avoid assigning a specific ethnicity… with this neutral color, fans can assign their own individual roles to LEGO minifigures."
—Wyatt Cenac, quoting LEGO's former official stance [07:23]

• Wyatt adds, "And what's weird is LEGO does have, like, they do Chinese New Year playsets where they have yellow minifigures… you've now got little yellow people celebrating Chinese New Year. Is there anybody at LEGO that's like, you sure you want to do that?" [09:19]

---

3. Cultural Context: Denmark and Inclusion? ([10:10]–[12:03])

• The minifigure arose amid a Danish push towards progressivism in the 1970s, welcoming refugees, yet still defaulting to yellow as "neutral."
• LEGO’s historical play worlds (space, city, medieval) mirrored European settings, reinforcing subconscious norms while professing inclusivity.

---

4. Implied Identity, Early Stereotypes & Complications ([12:03]–[17:17])

• Early minifigures only had limited hair options; non-white children like Wyatt would improvise with helmets to see themselves in these toys.
• The introduction of “Wild West” and “Islander” sets introduced problematic, stereotyped depictions—e.g., indigenous characters with exaggerated noses, gendered and sexualized “islanders,” bones in hair.
• Despite the yellow skin, the “othering” of characters is clear, producing a subtle “caste system” of good and evil within a supposedly race-free universe.

Memorable Moment:

“They’re trying to do race without ever breaking their commitment to not doing race.”
—Pablo Torre [15:54]

---

5. Hollywood Licensing & The Lando Effect ([17:17]–[24:43])

• With the advent of licensed sets (notably Star Wars in 1999), LEGO faces mounting pressure to represent specific, real-world characters.
• For years, sets included every major character but conspicuously omitted Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams)—eventually, LEGO “breaks the color barrier” by introducing a brown-skinned Lando.
• Afterward, all Star Wars characters receive explicit skin tones; yellow de facto becomes “white” by contrast.

Notable Quote:

“Lando has to break the color barrier, the literal yellow color barrier. And so even though they started making Star Wars sets in 1999, it’s not until around August 10, 2003, that the Lando minifigure is introduced and sold to people.”
—Wyatt Cenac [25:44]

• Pablo calls Lando “the Jackie Robinson of Legoland.” [24:47]

---

6. Licensed vs. Unlicensed: A New Segregation ([24:43]–[28:06])

• LEGO bifurcates the minifigure universe: licensed products feature diverse skin tones, while “core” (unlicensed) sets stubbornly remain all-yellow, thus resegregating the universe.
• The tension erupts anew in The LEGO Movie, which mixes both worlds and contradicts LEGO’s segregated logic.

Memorable Moment:

“LEGO’s resegregating Legoland.”
—Wyatt Cenac [27:11]

---

7. Real-World Mixing & Adult LEGO Culture ([28:06]–[37:02])

• Adult fans create massive, detailed builds at conventions (Brick Fair, Brick World), including recreations of historical wars, frequently the Civil War, using yellow minifigures regardless of historical accuracy.
• The secondary market (e.g., Brickmania) provides unofficial military and war accessories, sometimes co-opted for reactionary or revisionist displays.
• Real-life example: A January 6th insurrectionist planned his attack with a LEGO Capitol set at home.

Notable Quote:

“This educational toy that you’ve created is an educational toy that people are using to say, ‘Hey, we should talk about how the south should have won.’”
—Wyatt Cenac [36:27]

---

8. Corporate Priorities: Policing, Exclusion, and Stereotypes ([37:02]–[39:00])

• LEGO City is dominated by police, not schools, reinforcing certain values.
• In LEGO Space, even villains are “othered” as aliens, sometimes with blaxploitation-inspired designs, reflecting persistent real-world stereotypes.

---

9. The Foosball Set: LEGO’s Experiment in Inclusion ([39:00]–[41:43])

• Wyatt brings a LEGO Foosball set from the “LEGO Ideas” line—which uniquely features minifigures of varied skin tones, including one with vitiligo.
• The set contains 44 different heads for 20 bodies, finally offering users the chance to assemble racially diverse teams.

Notable Quote:

"To me, again, if you want to create a world where people can see themselves, this seems like the key to doing it."
—Wyatt Cenac [41:14]

---

10. Can LEGO Evolve? Philosophy & The Future ([41:43]–[42:27])

• Pablo wonders if LEGO can finally move toward a more nuanced, race-aware approach, admitting that the race-neutral utopia sought via yellow minifigures was always a myth.
• Wyatt sees hope in the foosball set—but notes it’s a rare exception, not a company-wide shift.

---

Memorable Quotes and Moments (with Timestamps)

• [07:23] "We chose yellow to avoid assigning a specific ethnicity in sets that don't include any specific characters." —Wyatt Cenac, quoting LEGO
• [09:19] "They do Chinese New Year playsets where they have yellow minifigures. I know that you're not saying that this is racially coded, but it is Chinese New Year, and you've now got little yellow people celebrating Chinese New Year. Is there anybody at LEGO that's like, you sure you want to do that?" —Wyatt Cenac
• [15:54] "They're trying to do race without ever breaking their commitment to not doing race." —Pablo Torre
• [24:47] "He is the Jackie Robinson of Legoland." —Pablo Torre, on Lando Calrissian's introduction
• [27:11] “They're resegregating Legoland.” —Wyatt Cenac
• [36:27] "This educational toy that you've created is an educational toy that people are using to say, hey, we should talk about how the south should have won." —Wyatt Cenac
• [41:14] "If you want to create a world where people can see themselves, this seems like the key to doing it." —Wyatt Cenac

---

Tone and Style

The episode is playful and witty, balanced by deep social analysis and firsthand anecdotes. Both Pablo and Wyatt deftly take serious issues—representation, race, and education—out of the abstract and into the world of childhood toys and adult fandom, making their critique sharp, accessible, and often funny.

---

Conclusion

The episode ends with Pablo and Wyatt planning to unbox and assemble the inclusive Foosball set as a symbolic act: “Let’s see if we can find a Lego Wyatt and a Lego Pablo and not have them commit atrocities on behalf of the military industrial complex” ([42:03]). The legacy and future of LEGO, they argue, rests in whether the company can transcend its race-neutral past and truly embrace the diverse world their fans want to build.

---

Recommended for:
Anyone interested in toys, pop culture, racial representation, corporate responsibility, or how childhood objects shape our understanding of the world.

---

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre. And today we're gonna find out what this sound is.

[B]

Yellow. Yes. Yes. That's a great idea. That's a great. Yep, yep, yep. We're in right after this ad.

[A]

You're listening to Giraffe Kings. So I've been doing a lot of research for this, by the way.

[B]

Is it research or is it playing?

[A]

I've been telling my wife that I am doing research as I play with my daughter's toys.

[B]

Now, wait, you said Violet has Legos. How many LEGO sets have you gotten her to this point?

[A]

So what I have, what I grew up with, I have given her.

[B]

Okay?

[A]

And so what I had was the Batlord Green Dragon Witch. I also bought for Violet, in Scare quotes, one of those. The newer sets. The Lego Bonsai Tree.

[B]

Oh, sure, okay.

[A]

Which I assembled and made her just watch me assemble because. Come on.

[B]

Did you, as you assembled it, were you just like. You can't touch this. Huh? Look at. Look at what Dad's doing.

[A]

I could not say that enough. Yeah, she was just.

[B]

Look, you're a Bat Lord, but me, I'm a LEGO gardener.

[A]

On this giant box on the table here. I don't know what the suggested age range is, but this is an enormous box of legos you brought me.

[B]

Eighteen. Eighteen and over.

[A]

Wow. Okay, so please describe why it's an act. Thank you for being here.

[B]

Thank you for having me.

[A]

What. What you brought on the subway with you to this studio today?

[B]

Yeah, I brought this on the subway. I was very worried that a child was going to ask me for it. I thought about putting in a trash bag.

[A]

Can you imagine being mugged?

[B]

Yeah, by like two aggressive 12 year olds.

[A]

Just the noise of the. All the. There's so many pieces in here was the first thing.

[B]

Yeah. Just them running away like, you'll never find us. Yeah. So this LEGO set that I brought, it is a LEGO Foosball set. When you build it, it is a playable Foosball table with Lego LEGO people as the different players on the teams.

[A]

I have never been more excited for an object that someone has brought into this studio. And we've had some weird objects in this studio. I suppose we should foreshadow sure that we will unbox this because it is significant to the enterprise that we're here to discuss.

[B]

Yes. And when we do that unboxing, should we do it as, like a full YouTube unboxing video? As. And also an ASMR video?

[A]

This is me licking my lips at the prospect of dethroning that kid. Was it Ryan's toys? We'll stare and yes.

[B]

Yes. You did it.

[A]

Great job, Ryan. And guess what, Ryan, your reign's over. All right, so you may be wondering why we are doing an episode about little yellow plastic people while everybody else is focused on the NBA and, you know, the rest of sports. And what you should know is that a startling portion of the NBA is also focused on those little yellow plastic people. Which also makes sense insofar as LEGO is the biggest and most beloved toy company in the entire world. Earlier this month, for instance, Sports Illustrated reported that Victor Wembanyama's first big purchase with his rookie contract, the thing he had been dreaming about upon making the NBA, was the Millennium Falcon Star Wars LEGO set. Meanwhile, another seven footer, Miles Turner of the Pacers, said he spends three to four hours every day playing with Legos. Although he also asked the press to, you know, not call it that big, big, big thing.

[B]

I build Legos, I don't play with Legos. But second of all, yeah, all the time.

[A]

And in fact, this philosophical distinction between playing and building happens to be at the heart of what I wanted to find out today. As does LEGO Star wars, incidentally. Because if LEGO's explicit mission here is to, quote, inspire and develop the builders of Tom, like my daughter and countless kids around the world, then LEGO is not just the biggest toy company in the world, it is the biggest education company in the world as well. Which makes all of these little yellow LEGO people, these minifigures, as they call them, an influential form of learning about the world around us in real life, whether you're, yes, Violet, or a big man like Victor Wembanyama and Miles Turner, or even if you're an Emmy winning comedian like Wyatt Cenac, who was here today because he spent months researching the answer to a very logical follow up question. What race are all these little yellow LEGO people actually supposed to be?

[B]

So this started with seeing the LEGO Movie. I noticed there was a character named Vitruvius who shows up, who's voiced by Morgan Freeman, and he's a brown skinned Lego Vitruvius. Lord Business. And prior to that, I'd never noticed race in Legos. And even in this movie you're just seeing yellow Legos and then all of a sudden this one brown Lego shows up. And for me, in that moment, I went back to what I thought when I was a kid, which was there is no race in Legos. So if no race is represented, I can be one of these little yellow Legos. So can a white person. So, like, anyone can be a little yellow lego. It's. There is no. There's no defined race. Then I see this LEGO Movie where I see hundreds of yellow legos, one black Lego, and that's it.

[A]

So I want to explain for people who maybe aren't as fluent in the racial politics of legoland.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

How it is that the color yellow, which is, of course, the defining color of every. They're called minifigures.

[B]

Minifigures. Yes.

[A]

Every LEGO minifigure is ostensibly yellow. This is my memory of it. I will put some statistics to it. Since 1958, apparently Lego has produced 600 billion bricks, 20 to 30 billion every year. And the color that everybody thinks of when they think about the skin tone of minifigures is yellow. And so what is the LEGO official position here, Wyatt? What did they say on their own behalf about how they see or don't see color?

[B]

Lego at one time explained on its website, we chose yellow to avoid assigning a specific ethnicity in sets that don't include any specific characters. With this neutral color, fans can assign their own individual roles to LEGO minifigures. LEGO has since removed this from their website, presumably because they didn't want a bunch of questions.

[A]

I mean, the Simpsons kind of tried this, I suppose.

[B]

I feel like for the Simpsons, when they did it, they did it because they said the color yellow popped more. And so they thought, visually, if you're watching television and you see yellow, it'll. It'll catch your attention. But the Simpsons never tried to pretend that yellow wasn't white. There are episodes where Homer describes himself as a white guy. It's awful being a kid.

[A]

No one listens to you. It's rotten being old. No one listens to you.

[B]

I'm a white male, age 18 to 49.

[A]

Everyone listens to me. No matter how dumb my suggestions are.

[B]

There are characters, whether It's Carl or Dr. Hibbert.

[A]

Dr. Hibbert, right.

[B]

They are black. They always walked in with this idea that yellow. We're just using yellow from a visual standpoint to. To get attention, not as some substitute for race. And one of the things, according to Lego, that they do talk about is that part of why they chose yellow was somewhat inspired by Pac man and the success of Pac man, which then begs the question, is Pac man supposed to be a white guy? Because it does seem like he spent a lot of time killing a multicultural band of ghosts. Like, why is he going after all these ghosts of color?

[A]

That's right.

[B]

And he's locking them up. Pac man and Policeman, they got a lot of the same letters. That's all I'm saying. And so they chose yellow. Now, there's a weird aspect of that in that there are some people who. For which yellow has often been used as a derogatory descriptor, I was gonna say. And what's weird is LEGO does have, like, they do Chinese New Year playsets where they have yellow minifigures. I know that you're not saying that this is racially coded, but it is Chinese New Year, and you've now got little yellow people celebrating Chinese New Year. Is there anybody, Anybody at LEGO that's like, you sure you want to do that?

[A]

So this raises the question of where. Where did Legos come from?

[B]

It's a Danish company. Yeah. So it is, in its own way, a bit of a monoculture, and it's a Danish company. But there's an interesting thing about the timing of when they created the minifigure. They created the minifigure in the late 70s. And at the same time, culturally, in Denmark, they decided to open their borders for the first time and take in refugees from Laos, Cambodia. And they pushed some of the most progressive legislation at the time for immigration after never having done it before. And so it does seem like, oh, there's something in the water at the time in Denmark. How do we be a more inclusive society? It's strange, though, that at that time, it is. Okay, we want to make this inclusive minifigure. Also, we're taking in a bunch of Asian people into our country. What's the most race neutral minifigure color we could come up with? Blue. No, not blue.

[A]

Something that doesn't feel like it is tipping our hand in terms of how we understand or totally don't understand race. Let's go with yellow.

[B]

Yes, yes. That's a great idea. That's a great. Yep, yep, yep. We're in.

[A]

And so the first sets that LEGO manufactures, early on, before it became this sprawling universe.

[B]

Right.

[A]

What are the first sorts of LEGO sets that you could get?

[B]

So with minifigures, they had kind of. They had three worlds. There was space city and medieval. And so space, you had rocket ships and astronauts, and it was less about conquering space and more. Way more about exploring. And then in city again, it was, okay, let's figure out how a city works. You need a hospital, you need a.

[A]

Fire department, a bunch of socialized institutions. Yeah, the Danish were presenting.

[B]

Exactly. It was all. It was just all the things of how a city runs. And then they had the medieval world where you had castles and knights. These are based on European castles. And so there, even though you are saying there is no race, it's very clearly a white man's castle.

[A]

So the question of how LEGO is going to start to simulate the real world raises questions that are immediately obvious when you look into the unblinking, smiling faces, these yellow faces, and you're like, oh, but they got hairstyles, though.

[B]

Yes, yeah. And when they started, they had two, and one was very much that Sam Donaldson Republican mold hairstyle with the part down the side. Yep. And then the other was kind of Pippy Longstocking, like pigtails. And so thinking back to when I was a kid, if I wanted to see myself in those LEGO minifigures, more often than not, I would keep a helmet, like a space helmet on or a knight's helmet on my LEGO minifigure and say, oh, that's me in that castle, or that's me in space. Or I would use the black Sam Donaldson hair and approximate that as mine. And just my Lego just had a. Had a bad trip to the. To the barber that. That week. Let's put a helmet on.

[A]

And in fact, when it comes to the default racially neutral depictions, I don't know how many people see themselves in the options available when it comes to the pigtails.

[B]

Right. Yeah, yeah, it's the little girl from Wendy's and Pippi Longstocking. They. That's. It's pretty much them. And maybe that one point guard for the Pacers, Nemhardt. He's also. That's right, he's also got pigtails.

[A]

Yes, but the pigtails also were just the beginning, because in the decades to come, LEGO would evolve. I remember becoming obsessed with Legos in the late 80s and into the 90s when they started airing commercials on television that promised more than just the generic recreations of space and city and more and more specific, almost historical reenactments, cinematic reenactments of scenes between people in conflict.

[B]

They had a Wild west world, and in that world, they introduce indigenous characters as the foil to cowboys. With some of the characters, you're actually drawing broad noses on their little minifigure faces, which was the first time that LEGO had actually changed a minifigure where they said, let's give it a nose.

[A]

Right?

[B]

And the nose to say that, like, oh, well, that person is other.

[A]

But. But they're still yellow.

[B]

They're still yellow. Those were still yellow.

[A]

Yes, but they're trying to. They're trying to begin to signal we're gonna. We're gonna do race without ever breaking our commitment to not doing race.

[B]

If you look at the old commercials for those toys, it's always about protecting the cowboys from the Native Americans on quest for sacred shield. Lego braves had come, Red Fox among them. Indian fortress loomed above. Red Fox grabbed canoe Dodge falling trees climbed hidden ladder. Sacred shield was his.

[A]

Or new Indians from LEGO Western.

[B]

If you look at the pirate world. Oh, yeah, it's all about plundering the native islanders.

[A]

No, the islanders are right behind us.

[B]

Let's hide it here. Oh, treasure.

[A]

What's that? Easy, mateys. They haven't got his head.

[B]

It's the first time that they depict cleavage. They sexualize the. The Islander characters. They put bones in their hair, which is not a thing that. If you look at any sort of images of Polynesian society, that's not a thing from Polynesian society. That's a thing from Hollywood. That's a thing from the Simpsons.

[A]

But hold on. Key correction here. Everybody is yellow, but we're also saying.

[B]

Those people are the other. They're not the ones you want to identify with. They are the villains.

[A]

Yes. There is a caste system.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Of good and evil.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Inside of the racially neutral universe of legos.

[B]

Yeah. Are you with Batlord or are you against batlord?

[A]

All of which is to say that if you're a kid in the 90s, as I was, and you're sort of noticing, okay, wait a minute, like, everyone's yellow, no one's any race. But also, clearly they are implying ethnicities. Yeah. It's interesting that it takes us, I guess, going to space, or more precisely, to a galaxy far, far away for this to really come to a head.

[B]

Lego was a successful company for a while, and then they started to struggle. And in their struggles, they realized to make more money, they would begin licensing with Hollywood, the NBA, other other worlds.

[A]

My name is Derek Johnson. I am the chair and professor in the Communication Arts Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

[B]

I talked to a couple academics, one who. He specifically looks at how things like race impact the ways that companies market themselves.

[A]

Lego's first licensing agreement was with Lucasfilm in 1999 for the Star wars prequels. Right. Remember when Phantom Menace came out, like there were LEGO sets to support that.

[B]

And then from that, from that licensing race, all of a sudden, not initially, but race starts to now creep into something in a much more tangible way.

[A]

Because now minifigures are not just general roles. Right. Like this person's a policeman, this person's a pirate. They're now trying to be specific characters and specific actors playing those characters. And so that brings with it, like, all of the racial discourses that. That come with any popularly recognizable figure, recognizable characters that all of us know in a different context. And so it presents an even more specific challenge to how are you simulating a world that I have seen already that I love if you're not going to accurately represent that one specific character?

[B]

Right. And so the challenge for LEGO was they started making those Star wars sets. They said, okay, we're going to make Phantom Menace sets, but we also recognize that people love the original trilogy, so we'll make sets for that as well. And with those original Star wars movies, they're making playsets with Han Solo, with Luke Skywalker, with Princess Leia. And for each of those characters, they were yellow minifigures. And for four years, and I want to say almost 50 play sets. It takes that long before they say, oh, maybe we should make a Lando Calrissian. Like, if you went on the street and just asked people, name me 10, 10 Star wars characters, I would say for most people, Lando Calrissian, he would be somewhere between four and seven.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Of the characters you name in that top 10 list.

[A]

Right, right, right. Some down the Chewbacca and Yoda.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Echelon. He is at least, like, second team. All Star Wars.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

At least. How conspicuous was it that they weren't making Lando?

[B]

It was really conspicuous because they were making other random characters. They made a LEGO minifigure for a character named Dak. Rather.

[A]

Not cracking my top 100. I don't know what the. That guy is.

[B]

No. Dak Ralter was in Star wars for, like, two seconds. He gets crushed by an ad at. And he gets a playset. He had one line in a Star wars movie. Just kind of like, hey, what's up, Luke? And they said, yeah, you deserve a minifigure. So very clearly they are struggling with something where they know, yeah, we. We've got to make all these figures. I got my LEGO Millennium Falcon. I got, you know, I got LEGO Luke, I got LEGO Han, I got Lego Chewbacca.

[A]

Right. I'm building a LEGO Cloud City.

[B]

Yeah. And they say, hey, where is Lando Calrissian? Foreign.

[A]

So we're now in the era of LEGO capitalism, where IP is now a big part of their business. They're seeing it, they're tasting it. And Star wars has been very profitable for them. And the problem is there's no Lando. And so Lando is a weird guy to keep on the bench. But when he arrives, the whole idea is there are many ways to depict Lando as yellow. Right? Like, if you're keeping the LEGO logic, you could give him. What. What would you do to have a LEGO Lando?

[B]

I mean, I think first off, you give him that outfit that he had. You give him his cape and his kind of bright blue, you know, blousy shirt and black pants. And that very much is. Oh, that's Lando's outfit. You have the mustache, you have the hair. There are ways to depict him by his costuming.

[A]

Right? They put a bone in the islander character's hair and they were yellow.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

And so what happens? What does LEGO decide to do?

[B]

Finally, it feels like for lego, that's the bridge too far that their brains can't say, well, we could just put costuming on Lando and that'll be enough. Now they say, well, Lando's the black one. That's very clearly how they see him. Not the caped one, not. Not the cool satin shirt one. It's. He's very clearly the black one. So we gotta make a black lego.

[A]

And to do that, it's like. Well, like, it does not compute. If we try to make a Billy Dee Williams minifigure who is yellow the same way as Luke Skywalker. Right. Billy Dee Williams was a former Blaxploitation star. Right. Like, you know, there are just ways in which, you know, our bodies are legible through race. And you can't make Billy Dee Williams without blackness. So for the first time in a licensed media set, LEGO releases the Lando Calrissian figure in a color they call reddish brown instead of yellow for the face.

[B]

And then that opens the door that they say, well, we have to go back and reintroduce more races. We have to make nougat and light nougat and reddish brown. And they go back and they. They make all of those characters raced. Han Solo, Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, they re released those sets, and now those characters have white skin. There is this whole world that they've.

[A]

Now created, right, where Lando Calrissian has integrated Legoland.

[B]

Yes. He is the Jackie Robinson of Legoland. It also means, oh, those NBA playsets we were doing. We don't just have to have generic NBA players now because we have this NBA licensing deal. We have name, image, and likeness for Shaquille o'. Neal.

[A]

Right?

[B]

For Vince Carter, for Dirk Nowitzki, for Jerry Stackhouse. Yes. And so now we don't just, we don't have to costume a, a generic LEGO minifigure and say, this is Shaquille O'. Neal. Because we've written O' Neal on the back and put a 34 on his jersey.

[A]

And the implications of this are, of course, massive because it's finally saying that if Lando is black or nougat of some variation, Reddish brown. Reddish brown. What then does yellow actually signify?

[B]

Seems to signify whiteness. It seems to signify that yellow has been white the whole time because Lando has to break the color barrier, the literal yellow color barrier. And so even though they started making Star wars sets in 1999, it's not until around August 10, 2003, that the Lando minifigure is introduced and sold to people. And on some level you would think, okay, well, at Legoland, August 10th ought to be a holiday.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

That is a day that we should mark as, you know, a celebration IS history on August 10th. I feel like any person of color should be able to walk into a Legoland or a LEGO store and say, everything's free for me today. Right. Is Lando Day.

[A]

But in terms of, in terms of the entity that had been doing all the ignoring, what is lego, the corporation say, when confronted with the reality now that the mask is off, like the entire time, now we know what's really been happening here.

[B]

So with that in mind, August 10th won't be a holiday in Legoland because LEGO decides to sort of split the world. And they say, okay, Lando is black. But you know what? Lando's in the licensed world.

[A]

They're resegregating Legoland.

[B]

Yes. And so now they've resegregated it as the licensed world and the non licensed true LEGO world. And so race exists in this licensed world where you have Star Wars, Marvel, the NBA, you can have race there. You can have a reddish brown Lando. You can also have LEGO Batman be light nugget. Those things can exist in that world, but they the streams will never cross where race exists in the LEGO world. Where this all comes back, though, and creates a problem is when you look at the LEGO Movie where you have both a black Vitruvius who seems to be of the LEGO world.

[A]

Right. This is the Morgan Freeman voice character.

[B]

That started your whole odyssey, this whole odyssey. You also have LEGO Batman, who is light nougat, who has infiltrated this world. But LEGO has said these two worlds should be separate. That if you're playing with LEGO Space Toys. LEGO Star wars doesn't belong in LEGO Space.

[A]

Right.

[B]

That there are no lightsabers in LEGO Space World. LEGO Game of Thrones World shouldn't interact with LEGO Castle World. These two things shouldn't interact. The LEGO Seinfeld playset shouldn't belong in LEGO City World.

[A]

There's actually a LEGO Seinfeld playset.

[B]

There is a LEGO Seinfeld playset and a LEGO Friends playset.

[A]

I imagine that LEGO Kramer has many complicated thoughts about all of these. Yeah, it was all of these matters.

[B]

It was so much easier for LEGO Kramer when everybody was yellow.

[A]

But this speaks to the way in which the internal logic, which is so crucial to LEGO as an educational company that wants to create a utopia for kids to embody. It speaks to how difficult that utopia is to maintain when in reality, everyone's playing with all sorts of legos all the time and they're combining it, right?

[B]

Yes. Yeah. And that's the problem is you can say you want a race neutral toy, you can present an idea of a race neutral society. You have your own challenges of how do you present that in a world where race and ethnicity are so sort of just tattooed on all of us in, in so many ways. But where you have a larger problem is once the toy is out of your factory and on a shelf and then in someone's hands and in someone's house, you don't control that anymore. There are these huge conventions around the world, like Brick Fair and Brick World, where they build all sorts of things. People build cityscapes that are huge, they build spaceships, they build whatever they want to build. And they are saying, oh, I'm taking these legos and I'm going to build what's interesting to me.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I'm going to introduce what I like into legoland.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And one thing that gets introduced into Legoland a lot is, is the Civil War and war in general.

[A]

How popular is the Civil War when it comes to how people are using licensed and I guess, standard variation legos?

[B]

It's real popular. It's very, very popular. You can find people making like 10, 15 foot long recreations of Civil War battles with the north and the south and occasionally a slave, and they make these giant builds.

[A]

This is the Battle of Fredericksburg from December 1862. We chose this battle. It's one of our favorites from the movie Gods and Generals, but also because of the distinctive geographic features, everything's identifiable and there's a good flow to it. You know, with the Union advance toward the Confederate defenses, we Have a map from an American heritage book that I grew up with. And then we have scenes from the movie gods and generals throughout the town and on the battlefield. So we combined the two. So we've got history with a little bit of the movie version.

[B]

And a lot of them, weirdly, it's battles where the south wins. So what was the ultimate culmination of the battle?

[A]

How did it end? It ended in a Confederate victory. And there are just like lots of these builds.

[B]

Lots of these builds.

[A]

Like, it's not just one battle of Fredericksburg. No, it's like multiple variations and something that's curious, Wyatt, that sort of hammers home what you've been observing this whole time is that the soldiers in the army are yellow.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I was always particularly interested in the battle for the Burnsides Bridge, which is depicted in this layout. By the time the event's taking place right now in the build is later in the afternoon, and there's only about 400 Confederates defending the bridge.

[B]

You can find a Lando head and put him in the field. They're a bunch of nuggets in the field. And it goes beyond that. And here's the weird part of it, is that Lego, these are not LEGO sanctioned builds. But because LEGO is appreciative of these adult fans, they allow a secondary market to thrive.

[A]

Welcome back to a Brick Mania review. Actually, kind of an overview, but we're going to be taking a look at the brand new Brickmania Civil War minifigure line brick arms.

[B]

Their whole thing is just building LEGO military uniforms and weapons for people to do these custom builds.

[A]

And so here we go. The Iron Brigade officer and Iron Brigade rifleman. And Dave, do you want to talk.

[B]

A little bit about the Iron Brigade? Yeah. The Iron Brigade is one of the.

[A]

Most distinctive brigades in probably actually the history of American military.

[B]

And so they have LEGO builds where it's not just the Civil War, it's a lot of wars where race is a thing. Tried to make a little 30 by 60 display that could embody as much of the Vietnam War as we could possibly fit in that space. Then we have the sort of the Vietnamese village, so we have some of the, I guess the villagers hiding, the Viet Cong troops, the guerrillas actually going.

[A]

In through the floor in one of.

[B]

The buildings into the underground tunnel where the military guys are all hiding. All the weapons are stashed.

[A]

Of course.

[B]

We have Rambo hiding underneath. You can rebuild LEGO Desert Storm and you can have us LEGO troops fighting LEGO terrorists.

[A]

What you're looking at here is a rendition of the 1991 Gulf War. And this is a model of an air base in Saudi Arabia where the A10 Warthogs operated out of. And you've got several different Warthogs on the flight line in different various positions.

[B]

Preparing to take off. And there's a whole market there that LEGO is just ignoring and saying, we won't provide it, but we also won't stop it.

[A]

Right. We won't stop you. If you want to build, I don't know, a, a LEGO Capitol building to be stormed on January 6.

[B]

But also they did build a LEGO Capitol building that they did build. They did build. And one of the guys who did storm the Capitol actually was found, like in his home. When they discovered, you know, plans and other things about storming the Capitol, they also found a fully built LEGO Capitol place.

[A]

Because, of course they did.

[B]

Officers recovered a fully constructed US Capitol LEGO set, according to court documents obtained by the website the Smoking Gun, because he needed a model to say, okay, well, we go in here and we do this and that. Now, there were no minifigures, which I'm sure if he could have, maybe there would have been a minifigure sitting at Nancy Pelosi's desk. But there was not. They didn't do that.

[A]

Yeah, there was, like in real life, minifigure. Mike Pence was nowhere to be found.

[B]

Yeah, no, he wasn't being, he wasn't being shuttled to safety. That is the weird thing about this world is again, when it gets to the adults and the adults are doing these builds, they're also saying both why they love LEGO, but what's important to them.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And that feels like if you're lego, it's worth self reflection. Because this educational toy that you've created is an educational toy that people are using to say, hey, we should talk about how the south should have won.

[A]

Right. If the promise of LEGO has always been, from the very beginning, as we said at the start, that they're more than just a toy company. And in fact, they are the number one toy company and maybe the number one educational company.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What happens if you've given everybody the tools, literally, to build not a utopia, but the opposite.

[B]

Right? Yeah. To build a war world. You see that war is something that can make you more money. And so what? And conflict makes you more money. And so even in the sanctioned LEGO world, if you go and you look at what is being sold in LEGO City, it's a lot of police. It's more police than lego. There's not a LEGO school. Yeah, but there are.

[A]

LEGO public school system isn't a hot seller.

[B]

No, but LEGO police state is. And where that then even goes further is they have yellow LEGO good guys and yellow LEGO bad guys. Policing then has now entered into the space world and there is LEGO space police. And LEGO was making good guys and then they had to make villains. And the villains were all aliens. And so they were all sort of bug eyed, weird looking aliens. And one of the aliens they made, again, where this becomes a challenge, they made a playset that was the lunar limo. And the LEGO space police are going after what looks to be a pimp. Oh, it very much feels like if these aliens had been watching Earth society, clearly they watched a lot of blaxploitation movies and they decided a bunch of space pimps were gonna try to commit crimes on Earth and the space police are there to stop them.

[A]

In other words, real subtle. Yeah, a real subtle build.

[B]

Yes. Yeah.

[A]

So this brings us back around towards the end here to the object you brought us that is not sitting on this table.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Because it is not merely a table foosball set that LEGO has manufactured. It also seems to be the key to diversifying any given build that you may want to create, whether that is the Capitol building or a Civil War reenactment or an NBA arena.

[B]

Yeah. So this foosball set, it's a. It's not a licensed product. It is part of Legoland. It was created in something called LEGO Ideas, which LEGO Ideas is something that they've done again, to try to engage with mostly that adult fan of LEGO audience, where LEGO fans can suggest builds and if they get enough votes, LEGO will build it. But the weird thing about it is all of the players on this foosball set, they're all LEGO people, they're all minifigures, but none of them are yellow. They are different ethnicities. There is light nugget, there's reddish brown. There is even one LEGO minifigure that has vitiligo. What's fascinating to me about this set is you have. And I'm gonna flip it over onto the back here. So with this set, you've been given 20 minifigure bodies. 10 for a blue team, 10 for a red team. But you've been given also 44 different heads of different shades.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Of nugget, of light nugget of reddish brown, of all their different colors. And to me, again, if you want to create a world where people can see themselves, this seems like the key to doing it. So it feels like to me, I'm like, well, with Lego, yeah. What would it take to just phase out the yellow minifigure?

[A]

Can LEGO finally admit that what they tried to build this utopia of racial blindness through the color yellow was actually unsustainable from the start?

[B]

Right. And that it's okay to acknowledge it and to try to evolve forward and this playset seems like an evolution with the times, but it's just this playset.

[A]

Right, Right. Which feels, Wyatt, at the very end here, like it's now incumbent upon us to open this box and actually build the change that we want to see in the world.

[B]

I. I'm with that. I'm. Let's see if we can find a Lego Wyatt and a Lego Pablo and.

[A]

And not have them commit atrocities on behalf of the military industrial complex.

[B]

No, yeah, let's. Let's. We can have them join Lego City World and they can lead a. They can lead a demonstration against an over policed state.

[A]

And for more of Wyatt Cenac's odyssey through the racial politics of Legoland, because there is even more you should know that he originally reported this story in conjunction with the good people over at Pineapple Street Media. You can find the full episode they produced together over on Wyatt's website, which is wyatt cenac.com I highly recommend all of that. But for now, Victor Wembanyama is not the only person in sports who is building a Lego set to achieve their dreams. If you are not watching on YouTube or the DraftKings network, it is now time for why did I to go build this foosball table and ourselves.