ApocaLego: Building end-times with plastic bricks

One of my favorite Lego genres -- and one for which the Lego Group will never release a set -- is that of ApocaLego. Whether it's a zombocalypse, bioplague, robot insurrection, or nuclear conflagration, builders who participate in this theme love detailing the end of days. Expect a lot of bikers, ruined buildings, and jackbooted reactionaries vainly trying to hold back the chaos. And it's a popular theme; the ApocaLego Flickr group claims over 1,000 members with over four thousand uploads.

Kevin "Crimson Wolf" Fedde (work pictured above) builds some of the most detailed and creative ApocaLego dioramas around. Kevin, a college student from Ft. Collins, CO, layers his models with intricate detail and mini shorelines, making them seem almost plausible. While he revels in the requisite "Mad Max" skirmishes, I love how he also shows how people's shanties look like. This is how they scrounge electricity. Those details are far more interesting for me than any battle.

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• [DJBudSonic]

  HAHA!  At least half the stuff my 6 year old makes from the giant trail-mix bin of lego/playmobil look like this!

• [liquidstar]

  These are great.  Funnest use of lego i ve seen yet.  Really reminds of the work of Canadian artist Kim Adams.

  http://diazcontemporary.ca/Artists_Adams.html

• [Donald Petersen]

  As much as I love the whole Mad Max/Fallout/The Stand/World War Z stuff (and oh boy, do I love it), it occurs to me that just about all my Lego/Tinkertoy/Erector Set/Lincoln Log construction projects in my youth had a decidedly preapocalyptic theme.  Airports, spaceships, lunar bases, castles, western forts… I guess I wasn’t thinking that the world would end anytime soon back in the 70s.  Well, there was always  nuclear annihilation, but I guess I always assumed a scorched earth with no stone standing upon another would be the result of that.  Not much fun to recreate a flattened blasted landscape there.  

  And then Damnation Alley opened my eyes to the joys of the apocalypse!

• [Sooper8]

  Lego doesn’t seem to lend itself to that genre easily. Lego is too ‘square’ and regular.
  Surely ApocaLego is all about rough edges and broken lines?

  • [grimc]

    That’s what I really find interesting about this; how people can take blocks of a uniform size and shape and create randomness.

  • [Anon_Mahna]

    digital camouflage……  it’s amazing what squares and rectangles can do when arranged just such & such of a way..

• [johnbaichtal]

  Sorry, STORYLINES, not SHORELINES. Curse auto-correct!

• [Tuff Luke]

  The top picture looks like Texas Battle Land in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

• [jimh]

  I love that it’s all actual Lego pieces, in contrast to the concentration camp model that was up last week, where the artist had glued, cut, and drilled…

• [Anon_Mahna]

  Last pic had me laughing. There’s a chicken crossing the road.

• [Lobster]

  This is WAY cooler than a concentration camp model.

• [bbonyx]

  Makes me feel like playing Borderlands again.

• [blindog]

  Seems like a natural progression of all those separate but similar sets. Once you’re done building and enjoying then what? Aha!