We are mischief makers at Contagious, and anyone plotting anything like the sort of stunt we saw earlier this week when an eight foot Lego character washed up on a beach in Holland deserves a high five and a pint of finest ale for their efforts. Yep, surreal but true: this is exactly what happened. Check out the image to see the 2.5m sculpture and a couple of kids who look like their birthdays and Christmas have come at once.
Mr. Plastic Fantastic rolled in as stunned onlookers dragged him up the shore, clad only in a lego T-Shirt bearing the grammatically inept yet utterly intriguing words, ‘No Real Than You Are’. Googling these words led to a website www.egoleonard.com, now sadly defunct. A bit of sneaky investigative journalism (oh, OK. we hung out on the Reddit comments board until someone was kind enough to translate the Dutch for us) reveals the following text:
‘My name is Ego Leonard and I greet you from the virtual world. A world which for me stands for luck, solidarity, everything green and blooming, and without rules and restrictions. Recently, my world has been flooded with luck-seekers and those who want power. Many new meetings in my virtual world have left me very curious as to your surroundings. I am here because I thought of your world and wanted to discover and understand it. Show me all of those beautiful things which your world has to offer. Be my friend, and tell me tales, take me on your travels to beautiful landscapes, show me your words and gestures.’
Ego Leonard. Hmmm. L.Ego. Lego maybe? And to think of all the time we wasted looking for life on other planets when there was a thriving alternative civilization right under our noses. The site was registered to
Dutch art collective Du Fois. We’ll keep you posted as soon as we get them on the phone. In the meantime, we’ve always been a fan of the way in which Lego’s marketing continues to make a simple bit of plastic so culturally relevant, so to the good people at Lego: if you had anything to do with this, we salute you.
And finally! As always on the web, most of the entertainment comes not from the stunt itself but from the commentary that follows. As soon as the story was linked to on Reddit, user Gulfie points out warily, ‘I think the Trojans were taken in by a similar device’. Does this mean Leonard is full of lots of tiny Lego people getting ready to invade Holland?
http://reddit.com/info/2d6a5/comments
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