A Model World

I haven't said much about my slide project lately, except that it's continuing. Here's a more thorough update: I've finished scanning my third bag of loose slides, the one on the left in this photo, and I've just started sorting the loose slides in the green middle bag. Then there are the boxes to go through. I'm trying to devise a way to consolidate those boxed slides while not mixing them together or allowing them to lose their context, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, yesterday I came across multiple slides of something that looked like an amusement park of miniatures. Above you can see a couple of rocket launchpads and lots of little vehicles leading up to and around them. For a sense of scale, there's a person standing behind and to the left of the rockets -- you can see he (and the buildings behind him) are much larger.

The sign on the right-hand building in the background says "Børneteater," which means Children's Theater in Danish. So that gives us a hint where we are.

These slides were all mixed in with a bunch of others, so as I came across them I set them aside in a special pile, and soon found that I had a dozen. They're from 1969.

When I looked more closely, it became obvious that these aren't just miniatures -- they're miniatures made with Legos! Yes, these photos do indeed show the first Legoland amusement park, the year after it opened in Billund, Denmark, in 1968.

The photos vary in quality. It took me a moment to figure out what I'm looking at here -- not a real ship out a window, but a Lego ship (a model of a ferry named the Winston Churchill) in a display case.

This is a model of Marselisborg Palace in Aarhus, Denmark, the summer home of the Danish royal family.

There's a model city, complete with a church with a wedding in progress -- you can see the little Lego people standing in the doorway.

There's a city of the future, featuring architecture worthy of the Jetsons.

And there's a sort of Western-themed area called "Legoredo," which despite the name does not appear to be made with Legos.

The photo quality is dubious overall, but it's nice to be able to add these images to the public record of the history of Legoland.

This Lego portrait, like the ship above, was apparently housed indoors and the photo didn't work out too well. The slide is also significantly discolored. But who knows if there are any images of this portrait elsewhere in the world? I might have the only one! (Google can't find any others, at least.)

Here's a fun short film about Legoland made by British Pathé studios in 1968, the year before all these pictures were taken. You'll see a lot of the same constructions depicted above and how they were made -- not to mention an "American Indian" in full feathered headdress, presumably in Legoredo.

I'm not a huge devotee of Legos, but I still found all this interesting.