Category:Lego Maxifigures

Lego Figures: Maxifigures || Legoland figures || Minifigures || Microfigures || other

1971: "Meet Mr. and Mrs. Stud" [image info]

1974: Lego Homemaker figures [image info]

1974: Constructing Homemaker figures (set 216) [image info]

1975: Patented head design [image info]

1974: The creeepy, creepy head, with elongated neck (that mates with a special brick) [image info]

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1975: Patented sloping brick parts for a Maxifigure dress [image info]

Lego's first figures were designed as a subsequent 1974 add-on to go with the 1971 Lego Homemaker dollhouse rooms and furniture, and were much larger than modern minifigures ... perhaps more like the Playmobil figures that they had a passing resemblance to. They are sometimes known as Homemaker figures or Maxifigures to distinguish them from the current smaller Minifigures.

Homemaker was originally launched as a sets of "empty" rooms and furniture without figures, which started being retrofitted to some of the sets later on – early publicity pictures of the sets suggested that owners might like to add their own smaller dolls to the rooms.

Playmobil?

Playmobil was launched, somewhat coincidentally, at the Nuremburg Toy Fair in ... 1974. So it's quite possible that Lego, launching a set of dollhouse sets without dolls, may have seen the Playmobil figures and decided that this was exactly what was missing from their own range.

Meet Mr and Mrs Stud

The Homemaker figures might not have been exclusively inspired by Playmobil. Lego's cartoon characters introducing the 1971 "Lets Play with Lego" booklet, "Mr and Mrs Stud" consisted of a perfectly round white head attached to a 2×3 stud brick, with rather cursory arms and legs scribbled onto the sides.

Mr and Mrs Stud's perfectly round heads, and general creepiness, seem to foreshadow that of the Homemaker figures.

Form

These first Lego figures were based on a 2×2 square body cross-section. Heads were large and round, with a top-stud for securing clip-on hair, two side-studs representing ears, and a long neck that mated with a special brick, so that the head could be turned easily without it coming off in the child's hand. The head was fitted to an upper-body piece that either had short simple jointed arms (for a child) or longer and more complex jointed arms (for an adult). The rest of the body had to be made from standard Lego bricks.

The result was more awkward and clunky than the Playmobil figures, which had jointed arms and legs, and which looked like actual figures rather than stacks of blocks with a head and arms attached.

Overall, the Lego design looked somewhat alien, especially when looking at a disconnected spherical "bald" head with three studs and long exposed neck. The recurring word, that appears spontaneously in many people's descriptions of the figures, is "creepy".

Hands

The figures' "hands" each consist of a round yellow pierced stud. This allows the hand to "hold" blocks by clipping its stud onto them, or to "hold" thin pieces like flags of flower stems if they are pushed through the stud's central hole.

Longevity

While the Playmobil figures survived and flourished, their Lego relatives did not, and when the Homemaker series was discontinued, the Homemaker people disappeared too.