Lego

These basic building blocks have bedazzled billions of budding brains since birth, basically. Perhaps no toy has penetrated popular culture quite like these classic, curious, colorful creations from our childhood. Sharing is caring! We’ll get lost in the long-lasting world of Lego on this week’s episode of FYI!
----------------------

Transcript

0:00

[Applause] these basic building blocks have bedazzled billions of budding brains since birth basically perhaps no toy has penetrated popular culture quite like these classic curious colorful creations from our childhood sharing is caring we'll get lost in the long lasting world of lego on this week's episode of f y i welcome to for your info english you got it[Music] hello hello hello and welcome to another exciting edition of fyi it's always a pleasure to have you on board and i can't believe it we are just trucking along to truck along as moment we are in the fourth season of the show and boy we have done so many topics and boyes chico perones and remember i'm always eager muchas ganas to hear different topics so make sure you send me your suggestions and today we're going back to our childhood why not who doesn't want to go and relive their childhood we've looked at a lot of episodes in the past where we have talked about our inner child nuestro nino integr well this episode is no exception and anybody who knows me as a person and that's most of my patrons i would say you guys know that i am a big kid my inner child is alive and kicking with no plans of dying down and don't worry to die down noes morid perdiendo fuerta and just a quick reminder we have an episode on toys if you want to hear about all kinds of different toys but i thought lego deserved their own episode i mean they have movies they have theme parks merchandise and everything else under the sun but as always we're gonna start out with our intro because i like to put a lot of vocabulary into the intro i didn't do that on purpose into the intro i started off the intro by saying these basic building blocks and let's look at the word these and this please tell me you don't pronounce them the same this uno este and these estos plural this is page one in the von systems manual and you'll be surprised at how many people write this people said yeah these people so remember this singular and these plural and these are building blocks speaking of building blocks because obviously building blocks are children's toys but also building blocks are the foundations of something so when we talk about atoms atomos for example we're talking about the building blocks and then i said they have bedazzled billions and to be dazzle i love that word des lumbrad i think would be an appropriate word in spanish they've bedazzled billions miles de miones of budding brains and the word brain is federal and the word budding well i think we looked at that in the gardening episode so something is budding esta floreciendo incipiente en su s brains well hey i needed a lot of bees then i said since birth basically perhaps no toy has penetrated popular culture quite like these classic curious remember no escudus it's curious colorful coloridos creations from our childhood and your childhood is your ninjath and then i said a very common idiomatic expression sharing is caring it means that sharing is a good thing another way to say that is share and share a like these are things that we talk about with children when they're learning to share because when kids are my daughter's age everything is it's mine this is mine that's mine i'm like baby that's a public fountain it's definitely not yours and then i said we'll get lost in the long lasting world of lego on this week's episode of fyi and remember this there is no plural well yeah there is but it's lego it's not a regular plural so you don't say i'm gonna play with legos well not according to the company it's lego in the singular and the plural form and the word lego is a fusion of two danish words have you heard the word danish before danish is danis so somebody from denmark is danish and it comes from two words the word leg que no es piernan danes it's play jugar and galt which is good so their motto slogan it's pretty simple play good which goes back to the whole sharing is caring thing we'll start out with a couple statistics just to give you an idea at how huge this phenomenon is and then we'll take a look at some of the history fun facts and we'll also look at expressions and so much more just remember everybody there's a bonus episode available every week so you get an hour english class based on a topic and if you want to join me and review these different shows and have a monthly master class well then you should go over to patreon.com alberto alonso and take a look around because we have got a curious community that's growing every day so remember if you want to be a part of it you want to have bonus stuff you want pdfs with all the vocabulary plus we're having events and all kinds of giveaways giveaways is obsequios i always forget that word vamos cuando so i'd like to send a shout out to all my patrons especially my super duper students javier roberto david jose maria mila alex and edgar and don't forget about my interstellar students issa paco diego and carmen if you guys want to find out more go on over to patreon.com alberto alonso and join us now let's get back into those statistics i was talking about oh and there's one i used to make a mistake with in spanish because you say estadistica all right well let's start with a little trivia question for you guys how many different ways do you think four no excuse me six lego bricks can be combined so let's say you had six lego bricks in front of you right now how many different ways could you combine them could you put them together did you say a million much more all right 10 million nope iffy house no they go 10 millions see no 10 million no you can combine six lego bricks 915 million different ways now talk about creativity and being able to do things your way a tu manera also 1 300 lego pieces are made per second por segundo that calculates to 78 000 pieces per minute and anybody good at math can you get the per hour how many lego pieces are made per hour four million six hundred and eighty thousand lego pieces are produced per hour and many of their manufacturing plants sus fabricas i think you say are located in denmark we already said denmark hungary and the people in hungary are hungarian and also in the czech republic mexico i mean all over the world here's another trivia question how many employees do you think the lego group has or how many people do you think they employ we can use it as a verb to employ then you've got employee who's the worker and the employer which is the person that signs the paycheck do you give up there are 18 000 employees working at the lego group so that's a lot of people and remember they're not all just molding bricks they have to have a marketing department and let's not forget lego is so much more than just bricks but right now we're talking a little bit about the bricks how many different colors do you think there are in production hmm we're going to see how well you guys know your lego facts 60 plus so that means there are more than 60 colors available and remember i just said that they have people making the different molds well supposedly the mold is so accurate the mold they use to make these lego bricks that it is accurate to the width lamborgh i think you say of a single human hair and they refer to this as clutch power and to clutch something is and if you think about it no matter how many times you put these bricks together and take them apart they still seem to have a perfect fit well according to the people at lego that's called clutch power also remember the word clutches and another thing that makes lego really cool not just that they're so accurate and that precision accuracy all of those ideals are important to them but also they stay true to who they were from the beginning they haven't changed over the years so you could have a lego set from your parents let's say from 1956 well that will still fit with the lego bricks that were made as we speak so that's something too because you look at companies like apple and they're constantly changing their own products so you can't use the same headphones with a phone you had last year not lego and i like that i'm a traditionalist in certain ways especially when it comes to toys and we'll learn in the bonus part just how much we can learn from these educational toys but right now let's take a look at some of the history they were invented by a guy named ol kirk christensen and he created the lego group in the year 1932. as i said he was a danish carpenter a carpenter evidently carpintero carpintero a woodpecker see solo i kept sarin woody woodpecker well he started making wooden toys in 1932. it wasn't until 1949 though that he patented the famous interlocking wooden version of the lego brick so there's an interesting fact too the original legos were not made of plastic they were made of wood who woulda thunk it would would okay a really bad joke i thunk no es una palabra seria who would have thought it[Music] we usually say the word incorrectly es who would have thunk it and from 1949 to this day the company has continued to evolve as i said they don't just make toys but we'll talk more about the theme parks and the movies a little bit later i want to talk about licensing because intellectual property is big business and the first time that they worked in this business was in 1999. they licensed it to star wars and well we as we see that really worked and now that's just one of the many intellectual properties but it all started with star wars in 1999 and you know what thinking about it it seems like they've been doing it for much longer than that but also remember they had ones like the taj mahal you know like the seven wonders of the world and the empire state building and the statue of liberty but this was the first time it was based on a movie or as i said before intellectual property and boba fett from the star wars cloud city lego set is one of the most rare and most collectible lego minifigures in the world and i was taking a look online some of these go for a lot of money and to go for us let me give you an idea the millennium falcon speaking of of uh football no speaking of star wars the 2018 millennium falcon which isn't even that old i'm not talking about a toy a collector's item from 1977. i'm talking about something that's just a few years old and right now if you can get your hands on that in mint condition mintes condicion de fabrica buenisimo 800 bucks guys we're talking about little pieces of plastic so some people get lego and they don't really put them together and take them apart they keep them in the box which is another way to enjoy lego now i have to say i've never been good at collecting things because i had a for example i had a buzz lightyear in the original box i couldn't keep it in the box my daughter and i wanted to play with buzz but i get it though again some of these stats might change since there are always records being broken and that's the way it works but at the time of the recording of this show the most expensive lego minifigure is the 14 carat gold what carrot fan audies well no no no kilatis it sounds the same they're spelt differently see guys this is something that you'll find in the pdf documents so remember that if you're a patron for as little as three euros a month you guys can follow along and look at all the vocabulary i'm saying as i say it and hopefully you'll repeat it aloud well this minifigure this star wars 14 karat gold c-3po is said to be worth 200 bucks and i know what you're thinking 200 bucks that's peanuts guys we're talking about something that's smaller than your pinky and your pinky is tu dedo but there are only two of these characters in existence another first was in 2003 they made these nba basketball minifigures and that was the first time they based any lego products on real people such as the late el difunto kobe bryant but that wasn't the first minifigure that was the first minifigure who was a celebrity the first lego minifigure ever was a cop a coppice a police officer and he was part of the lego town theme which came out in early 1978 when i was just one year old oh and i just said records are being broken every day when i was preparing the episode i googled uh guinness records with lego and i got 6784 results i'll give you some of the ones i came up with but again these are constantly being shattered yeah to break a record a sunakosan to shatter it is destroyed the largest lego set ever sold was the lego taj mahal which i mentioned earlier in the show it had 5922 pieces the land rover company recently set the world record for the largest lego sculpture the most bricks now i know i just said the other one had 5922 well that's the largest lego set ever sold this was one that was done for a publicity stunt estos so they built a replica and this replica was built for the unveiling a veil is something that covers something so if you unveil it you're showing it to everybody for the first time so they unveiled a new suv un cuatro por cuatro and they made a replica of the tower bridge in london and this is a 13 meter replica again the difference between this and the taj mahal is you can buy the taj mahal set this was done with a company and with permission and the whole nine yards itodo eso also remember we said people have their own collections there's a a guy fabio bertini he is the current record holder at the time of this recording for the most minifigures at home and this guy is in san marino and he has a collection of 3 310 mini figures and he's not counting the ones that he has two of the duplicates so that's a lot of lego figures i mean how do you find the one you're looking for when you want it and some of the ones from his collection are from the 1970s so in the lego realm in el mundo de lego this guy is a legend and the most expensive lego was a two by four lego brick now two by four is two inches by four inches so two by four lego brick which was crafted in 14 carat gold i already mentioned this one to you but i didn't tell you the price there how much do you think it cost how much do you think it went for why don't you answer me using a full sentence it went for and this was at an auction an auction is una su basta it went for 12 500[Music] and that is pretty cool and what makes this brick so special well it was a brick this gift brick that they gave to their employees who were working for the company between 1979 and 1981. now i've gotten some really nice christmas baskets from my company but gold a block of gold i think i'm working at the wrong company and beware of knockoffs a knockoff is una copia of course if you've got something that works like that a lot of people are gonna check it out and try and do the same thing and possibly sell it for cheaper but lego is the biggest brand it's when you think of these building blocks you think of lego but they weren't the first ones to do it there was an english toy maker a woman named hilary fisher page and she invented these similar building bricks in 1936 and they were called brie plaques well later they renamed them to kittycraft self-locking bricks but lego wasn't gonna have that they said no no no man we're the most popular even though you came first we perfected it perfection so in 1981 they acquired the residual rights los derechos residuales in the kittycraft brick designs in a court settlement so they took them to court and lego one i guess that's why this episode is about lego and not kiddie craft and that's not the only lawsuit or settlement they've had recently they won a major intellectual property lawsuit against a huge counterfeiter in china a company called lepin and they were trying to do their own knockoff of lego and lego found out and they went after them so there's something we can say here lego must have good lawyers but putting all the drama aside because any major company has its share of drama this company has reminded many of us of our childhood even our parents of their childhood and who knows maybe generations to come and as we said there are a lot of imitations but as we say in english accept no imitations and i'll tell you the same thing with fyi there are a lot of english shows out there but there's only one fyi except no imitations i sure hope you'll join us in the bonus part of today's f y i[Music][Applause] you