Lego Ideas Voters Push Dali, Hook and Incredibles Toward Reality
Three fan-built Lego projects have cleared a major hurdle on the road to becoming real, store-shelf products. Each gathered 10,000 votes of support in the latest round of the Lego Ideas program, earning them a place in front of the company’s internal review team. The trio draws on art history and Hollywood: a melting-clock sculpture inspired by Salvador Dali’s famous painting The Persistence of Memory, a pirate ship from the 1991 film Hook, and the towering robot from Pixar’s The Incredibles.
Lego Ideas is the Danish toymaker’s crowdsourcing pipeline. Fans design and upload a model using digital building tools, then campaign for supporters. Hit 10,000 votes and the project enters official assessment, where designers weigh build quality, playability, licensing and whether the idea fits the brand. Only a fraction of qualifiers make it to production, and those that do are sold globally under the fan designer’s name, with royalties attached.
The Dali entry, submitted by a builder using the handle Brick Dangerous, uses 1,915 pieces to recreate the painting’s iconic drooping clocks. Capturing soft, sagging forms with rigid plastic bricks is the central challenge, and the build leans on curved and angled elements to suggest clocks melting over a branch and a table edge. It is the kind of art-history crossover that has performed well in past Ideas rounds, where paintings and landmarks have found new lives as display models.
The Hook pirate ship arrives with a different appeal: nostalgia for a live-action family film that many adult fans grew up with, plus the evergreen pull of tall ships as display pieces. The Incredibles robot, meanwhile, targets the superhero crowd with a machine built for a memorable movie showdown. Together the three show how Ideas has shifted from quirky original concepts toward recognizable intellectual property — a trend that has not always pleased purists, who argue licensed projects crowd out unknown creators.
Assessment is not a guarantee. Reviewers routinely reject popular designs over price, stability or licensing conflicts, and the queue of 10,000-vote projects keeps growing. Results typically arrive months after a review round closes, and a rejection does not bar a designer from trying again with a revised concept.
For collectors in China and elsewhere, the practical question is cost. Large licensed sets have crept upward in price, and a nearly 2,000-piece art model would likely land in premium territory. Fans tracking the program often treat each review round as a small sporting event, debating which entries deserve shelf space before Lego announces its picks.
None of the three has been approved yet, and the company has not signaled when decisions will come. What is certain is that the pipeline keeps producing odd, ambitious ideas — and that a painting about the unreliability of time has now become a contender for mass production in plastic bricks.