Pablo Torre Finds Out - The Jackie Robinson of Legoland, with Wyatt Cenac

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

LEGO is, in many ways, the biggest education company on the planet — an influential form of learning about the world around us, whether you're a kid, or an NBA star like Victor Wembanyama, or the Emmy-winning comedian Wyatt Cenac, who spent months researching how the famously yellow faces on millions of mini-figures… became so racially confounding. Pablo and Wyatt unbox a gigantic foosball table and explore a plastic world where the Civil War and January 6 never end.More on race and LEGOs from Wyatt Cenac and Pineapple Street Media:https://www.wyattcenac.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. Yellow. Yes, yes. That's a great idea. That's a great, yep, yep, yep, we're in. Right after this ad. You're listening to Giraff Kings Network. So I've been doing a lot of research for this, by the way. Is it research or is it playing?

I've been telling my wife that I am doing research as I play with my daughter's toys. Now, wait, you said Violet has Legos. How many Lego sets have you gotten her to this point? So what I have, what I grew up with, I have given her. Okay. And so what I had was the Bat Lord Green Dragon Witch. I also bought, for Violet, in scare quotes, one of those, the newer sets, the Lego Bonsi tree. Oh, sure. Okay.

Which I assembled and made her just watch me assemble because, come on. Did you, as you assembled it, were you just like, you can't touch this? Huh? Look at what Dad is doing. I could not say that enough. Yeah. She was just, look. You're a bat lord, but me, I'm a Lego gardener. 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. He brought me. I think it's 18 and over. Wow. Okay, so please describe Wyatt Sinak. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. What you brought on the subway with you to this studio today.

Yeah, I brought this on the subway. I was very worried that a child was going to ask. ask me for it. I thought about putting in a trash bag. Can you imagine being mugged? Yeah, by like two aggressive 12-year-olds. Just the noise of all the, there's so many pieces in here was the first thing. 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 play. It is a playoff. It is a play fuzzball table with Lego Lego people as the different players on the teams.

I have never been more excited for an object that someone has brought into the studio, and we've had some weird objects in this studio. I suppose we should foreshadow that we will unbox this because it is significant to the enterprise that we're here to discuss. Yes, and when we do that unboxing, should we do it as a full YouTube unboxing video and also an ASMR video.

This is me licking my lips at the prospect of dethroning that kid. Was it Ryan's toys? We'll scare. And yes! You did it! Great job, Ryan! And guess what, Ryan? Your reign's fucking 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 Illustrator reported that Victor Wembenyama'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 we also asked the press to, you know, not call it that. Big, big, big thing. I build Legos. I don't play with Legos. 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 tomorrow, 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 mini figures, 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 Wembeyanama

and Miles Turner, or even if you're an Emmy-winning comedian like Wyatt Sennack, 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. 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. There is no defined race. Then I see this Lego movie where I see hundreds of yellow Legos, one black Lego, and that's it. So I want to explain people who maybe aren't as fluent in the racial politics of Legoland. How it is that the color yellow, which is, of course, the defining color of every, they're called mini figures.

Mini figures, yes. Every Lego mini figure is ostensibly yellow. This is my memory of it. I'll 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 mini figures is yellow. And so what is the Lego official position here, Wyatt? What do they say on their own behalf about how they see or don't see color?

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 mini figures. Lego has since removed this from their website, presumably because they didn't want a bunch of questions. I mean, The Simpsons kind of tried this, I suppose.

I feel like for The Simpsons, when they, And 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 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. No one listens to you.

It's rotten being old. No one listens to you. I'm a white male, 18 to 49. Everyone listens to me, no matter how dumb my suggestions are. There are characters, whether it's Carl or Dr. Hibbert. Dr. Hibbert, right? They are black. They always walked in with this idea that yellow, we're just using yellow from a visual standpoint 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? That's right. 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 going to say. And what's weird is Lego does have, like they do Chinese New Year play sets where they have yellow mini-figure.

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? So this raises the question of where did LEGOs come from? It's a Danish company. Yeah, so it is in its own way a bit of a monocultural.

And it's a Danish company, but there's an interesting thing about the timing of when they created the mini figure. They created the mini figure 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 mini-figure. Also, we're taking in a bunch of Asian people into our...

country, what's the most race-neutral mini-figure color we could come up with? Blue? No. Not blue. 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.

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

And so the first sets that Lego manufacturers... early on, before it became this sprawling universe. Right. What are the first sorts of Lego sets that you could get? So with many figures, 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 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 fire department. A bunch of socialized institutions at the Danish we're presenting. 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. 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. Yes, yeah. And when they started, they had two. And one was very much that Sam Donaldson, the Republican mold hairstyle with the part down the side. Yep. And then the other was kind of pippy longstocking.

like pig tails. And so thinking back to when I was a kid, if I wanted to see myself in those Lego mini figures, more often than not, I would keep a helmet, like a space helmet on, or a Knight's helmet on my Lego mini figure 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 bad trip to the barber that week. Let's put a helmet on. 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 pig tails.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's the little girl from Wendy's and Pippi Longstocking. And they, it's pretty much them. And maybe that one point guard for the Pacers, Nemhart. He's also, he's also got pig tails. Yes. But the pig tails 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 recreaty. of space and city, and more and more specific, almost historical reenactments, cinematic reenactments of scenes between people in conflict. 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 mini-figure faces, which was the first time that Lego had actually changed a mini-figure

where they said, let's give it a nose. Right. And the nose to say that, like, oh, well, that person is other. But, but they're still yellow. They're still yellow. Those were still yellow, yes.

But... They're trying to begin to signal we're going to do race without ever breaking our commitment to not, doing race. 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. Oh, you idiot. From I go western.

If you look at the pirate world, it's all about plundering. the native islanders. It's the first time that they depict cleavage. They sexualize 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. But hold on. key correction here, everybody is yellow. But we're also saying those people are the other. They're not the ones you want to identify with. They are the villains.

Yes, there is a caste system of good and evil inside of the racially neutral universe of Legos. Right, yeah. Are you with Bat Lord or are you against Bat Lord? All of it 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 clear, 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. 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 worlds. My name is Derek Johnson. I am the chair and professor

in the Communication Arts Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I talked to a couple academics, one who he specifically looks at how things like race impact the ways that companies market themselves. 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. 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. Because now many figures 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 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.

Right. And so the challenge for Lego was when 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 play sets with Han Solo, with Luke Skywalker, with Princess Leia, and for each of those characters, they were yellow mini figures. 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 ask people, name me 10 Star Wars characters, I would say for most people, Lando Calrissian, he would be somewhere between four and seven

of the characters you name in that top 10. list. Right, right, right. Somewhere around the Chewbacca and Yoda, Eschelon, he is at least like second team all Star Wars. Yes. At least. How conspicuous was it that they weren't making Lando? It was really conspicuous because they were making other random characters. They made a Lego mini figure for a character named Dak Raltor. Not cracking my top 100. I don't even know what the fuck that guy is. No, Dak Router was in Star Wars for like two seconds. He gets crushed by an adat. 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, you deserve a mini figure. 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 Chubaca. Right, I'm building a Lego Cloud City. Yeah. And they say, hey, where is Lando Calrissian? 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? 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, blousey 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. Right. They put a bone in the Islander character's hair, and they were yellow. Yeah, exactly. And so what happens? What does Lego decide to do, 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 them, not the case. one, not the cool satin shirt one. He's very clearly the black one, so we got to make a black Lego. And to do that, it's like, well, like it does not compute if we try to make a Billy D. Williams mini figure who is yellow the same way as Luke Skywalker, right? Billy D. Williams was a former black exploitation 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 D. Williams without blackness. So for the first time in a licensed media set, Lego releases the Lando Calerician figure in a color they call reddish, reddish brown, instead of yellow for the face. 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 make all of those characters raced. Han Solo, Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, they re-release those sets, and now those characters have white skin. There is this whole world that they've now created.

Right, where Lando Calerisian has integrated Legoland. He is the Jackie Robinson of Legoland. It also means, oh, those NBA play sets 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. For Vince Carter, for Dirk Novitsky. For Jerry Stackhouse.

Yes. And so now we don't just, we don't have to costume a, a generic Lego mini figure and say, this is Shaquille O'Neal because we've written O'Neal on the back and put a 34 on his jersey. And the implications of this are, of course, massive because it's finally saying that if Lando is black, or Nuget of some variation,

reddish brown. Reddish brown. What then does yellow actually signify? 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 10th, 2003, that the Lando mini figure is introduced and sold to people.

And on some level, you would think, okay, well, at Legoland, August 10th, ought to be a holiday. Yes. 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 Lego land or a Lego store and say, everything's free for me today, right? It's Lando Day. But in terms of the entity that I've been doing all the ignoring,

what does 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. 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? Landau's in the licensed world. They're resegregating Lego Land.

Yes. And so now they've re-segregated it as the licensed world. 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 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. Right, this is the Morgan Freeman voice character that started your whole odyssey.

The start of this whole Odyssey. You also have Lego Batman, who is light Nuggan. 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. Right. 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 play set shouldn't belong in Lego City World. There's actually a Lego Seinfeld playset. There is a Lego Seinfeld playset. And a Lego Friends play set. I imagine that Lego Kramer has many complicated thoughts about all of these matters. Yeah.

It was so much easier for Lego Kramer when everybody was yellow. 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, 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-eastern, ethnicity are so sort of just tattooed on all of us 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. I'm going to introduce what I like into Legoland. Yes. And one thing that gets introduced into Legoland a lot is the Civil War. And war in general. How popular? How popular? How popular? is the Civil War when it comes to how people are using licensed and, I guess, standard variation

Legos. 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. 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. And a lot of them, weirdly, it's battles where the South wins. So what was the ultimate culmination of the battle? How did it end?

It ended in a Confederate victory. And there are just like lots of these builds. Lots of these builds. 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. Yeah. I was always particularly interested in the battle for the Burnside Bridge, which is depicted in this layout. By the time the events taking place right now in the bill is later in the afternoon

and there was only about 400 Confederate defending the bridge. You can find a Landauhead and put him in the field. There are 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. Welcome back to a brickmania review, actually kind of an overview, but we're going to be taking a look at the brand-new brick-mania Civil War minifigure line.

Brick arms, their whole thing is just building Lego military uniforms and weapons for people to do these custom build. And so here we go, the Iron Brigade Officer and Iron Brigade Rifleman. And Dave, do you want to talk a little bit about the Iron Brigade? Yeah, the Iron Brigade is one of the most distinctive brigades. and probably actually the history of American military. And so they have Lego builds where it's not just a 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, you know, hiding the Viet Cong troops, the guerrillas are actually going in through the floor in one of the buildings into the underground tunnels where the military guys are all hiding style, all the weapons are stashed. Of course, we have Rambo hiding underneath. You can rebuild Lego Desert Storm

and you can have U.S. Lego troops fighting Lego terrorists. What you're looking at here is a rendition of the 1991 Gulf War. And this is a model of an airbase in Saudi Arabia where the A-10 warthogs operated out of. And you've got several different wardhogs on the flight line in different various positions 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. Right. We won't stop you if you want to build, I don't know, a Lego capital building. building to be stormed on January 6th.

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 in his home when they discovered plans and other things about storming the Capitol. They also found a fully built Lego Capitol play set. Because of course they did. officers recovered a fully constructed U.S. 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 mini figures, which I'm sure if he could have, maybe there would have been a mini figure sitting at Nancy Pelosi's desk. But there was not, they didn't do that. Yeah. There was, like in real life, mini figure Mike Pence was nowhere to be found.

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. Yes. 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. 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're the number one toy company and maybe the number one educational company. What happens if you've given everybody the tools, literally, to build not a utopia but the opposite. 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 shit. It's more police shit than Lego, there's not a Lego. school. Yeah. But there are... Lego public school system isn't a hot seller?

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 place that was the lunar limo. And the Lego Space Police are going after what looks to be a pimp. It very much feels like if these aliens had been watching Earth Society, clearly they watched a lot of black exploitation movies and they decided a bunch of space pimps were going to

try to commit crimes on Earth and the space police are there to stop them. In other words, real subtle. Yeah. A real subtle built. Yes, yeah. So this brings us back around towards the end here to the object

you brought us that is not sitting on this table. Yes. 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. Yeah. So this foosball set, it's not a licensed product. It is part of Lego Land.

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 foothball set, they're all Lego people, they're all mini figures, but none of them are yellow. They are different ethnicities. There is light nugget, there's reddish-brown, there's even one Lego mini figure that has Vidaligo.

What's fascinating to me about this set is you have, and I'm going to flip it over on to the back here, So with this set, you've been given 20 mini-figure bodies, 10 for a blue team, 10 for a red team. But you've been given also 44 different heads of different shades. Right. 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 mini figure? 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? Right. And that it's okay to acknowledge it and to try to evolve forward. And this play set seems like an evolution with the times, but it's just this play set. 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. I'm with that. 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. No. Yeah. We can have them join Lego City World and they can lead a, they can,

lead a demonstration against an over-policed state. And for more of Wyatt Sinnak'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 wighttsenac.com.

I highly recommend all of that. But for now, Victor Wembenyama is not the only person, in sports who is building a Lego set to achieve their dreams. If you are not watching on YouTube for the Draftings Network, it is now time for why did I to go build this foosball table and ourselves.