this article says lego is making a

resurgence. c'mon now, LEGO NEVER TOOK A DIVE to begin with. lego has ALWAYS been and will ALWAYS be popular.

well i AM looking forward to the new lego board game (2010)

(while i love legos with my whole being, there is a bit of sexism in this article .... 'if you give boys legos they'll build guns..... type of shite. well it's just that, shite)


Turning to Tie-Ins, Lego Thinks Beyond the Brick
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
Billund, Denmark

FROM the outside, there is nothing playful about the drab, two-story Lego Idea House here, where designers gather in whitewashed rooms to dream up new toys. But upstairs, behind a series of locked doors accessible only to employees with special passes, is a chamber that might as well be toy heaven for kids — and more than a few adults.

Multicolored Lego creations in every imaginable size and shape spill from the shelves, from Indiana Jones’s biplane to Darth Vader’s fighter. Boxes stamped “confidential” hold potential future blockbusters, like Buzz Lightyear, the hero of the “Toy Story” animated films, as well as a police station bustling with miniature cops and robbers.

“It’s our way of looking at the world,” says Soren Holm, the head of Lego’s Concept Lab. “We have happy criminals; even they are smiling. The sun is shining every day.”

While that may be true of Lego’s toys, until recently it was hardly the case for Lego’s bottom line. But five years after a near-death experience, Lego has emerged as an unlikely winner in an industry threatened by the likes of video games, iPods, the Internet and other digital diversions..........

pic:

Thousands of Lego cubes for new toys. "There's a huge community of people that treat Lego as an art form rather than just a toy," says Andrew Becraft, a technical writer at Microsoft who created the Brothers Brick blog. His site pulls in 125,000 unique visitors a month, and Lego officials estimate that 915,000 people worldwide attended Lego conventions and other events in the first seven months of 2009.

Photo: Jakob Dall for The New York Times