It all started with seeing an ad for Benny's Spaceship Spaceship Spaceship! in a local buy and sell. I hadn't seen the lego movie and had no idea what inspired the set. But I could tell by looking at it, it was a part of the Classic Space genre, and I should get it. Assembling it at my kitchen table, I forgot how much fun lego could be, even for an adult.
Only a couple days after buying Benny’s Spaceship, because the algorithm on the buy & sell knew I had clicked on a lego item, it started showing me more local lego sets. One of them was set 6824 Space Dart I. I noticed that I didn’t have any original sets with blue spacemen. The price was very reasonable, so I thought I should add it to the collection.
So now I had these two completed sets sitting around, not in storage away from view, but right in front of me. With a shock, it dawned on me that it had been 40 years since I had put the moonbase away with the intention of displaying it again when I was an adult. Well, there had been opportunities for that for at least 20 of those years, and I hadn’t done anything about it. I realized that I wasn’t getting any younger. If I was going to set up a second moonbase in any meaningful way, it had to be done now.
I cleared off the big shelf in the storage room that I had originally visualized as being the location for the display. Much to my surprise, I found it was totally inadequate. I had far more lego, taking up far more space, than I had imagined. My shortcomings in spatial relationships were on full display.
I had an old, particle board computer desk in my office that I didn’t honestly need. It was really just storage instead of a work space. I replaced it with a large table and voila, Moonbase 2 had a home.
I started laying out the road plates and crater plates, not in any particular order or plan, but based on the way I remembered the layout from my childhood. I started thinking of that corner in the basement playroom as “moonbase 1” and this new display as “moonbase 2.”
Then something remarkable happened. The next time my sister was visiting, I took her into the office to show her the new display. To my surprise, what I thought was going to be a quick, five minute viewing turned into a three hour conversation about the lego and how central it was to our childhoods. I was floored when she revealed to me that when we were kids, when I wasn’t home she would go downstairs and play with the lego, driving around the little vehicles and swooshing the spaceships. When she was finished, she was completely careful to put everything back exactly the way it was so I wouldn’t know she had played with it.
She was right of course. Eight year old me would have been infuriated to know my big sister had been touching my precious lego, but as an adult, I was thrilled. I was incredibly pleased to know that someone else had also gotten some joy out of those toys.
Later on, when I had my mother over, I showed her the new moonbase and the same thing happened. What I thought was going to be a quick in-and-out, and then on to other things ended with us both sitting in front of the display in a long multi-hour conversation about the earliest years of our family. We discussed what the lego meant to my sister and I as children, and what it meant to my mother and father as parents. My mother shared with me discussions she and my late father had about what sets to purchase as gifts, their desirability as toys from a creative and educational viewpoint, and the joy they got by sharing in my joy. I had never realized how central a part lego had played in our family and our shared experiences of growing, learning, and developing together. After sharing these discussions with my partner and taking in her observations and insights, Moonbase 2 quickly took on a greater importance.
After my sister and I assembled 6980 Galaxy Commander at my dining room table, I placed some minifigures around the set on its’ landing pad with wrenches and took some photos. I texted them to her with a teasing message that the minifigures didn’t like the assembly job she did and were going over the ship to correct her mistakes. She immediately replied that they were doing nothing of the sort, but that they were “company men” simply doing their due diligence in quality control. And with that, what would become this website was born.
I found myself making dioramas and still scenes again, much like I did as a child, but photographing them on my phone and texting the images and narratives to my sister and partner. Quite by accident, a cohesive story line emerged. They nicknamed these texts “the moonbase chronicles,” and the activity soon outgrew the ability of SMS text to convey it. They suggested I create a website, where I could attach sound effects and better sequencing. The final product is what you see today.
The storyline is intended to recreate the fun and simplicity of childhood play. Think of it a children’s storybook, with brief moments of more sophisticated humour for adult or parental enjoyment. The stories sometimes contain more complex and difficult themes at times, because life can be complex and difficult, and play reflects life.
Some of the displays are crude and grossly simplistic, but they are intentionally so. They are meant to reflect the unreserved imagination of childhood. While fun for me to create now, as children, we didn’t need special effects and AI generated imagery to play, and neither do kids today. A chesterfield becomes a mountain range. The carpet in one room transforms into the wave tops of an ocean. The linoleum of another becomes the sea floor. A bedspread becomes the surface of an asteroid, tumbling through space. In the episodes in this website, when you see an image of a ship flying through space with a closet or doorknob clearly in the background, it’s because that’s exactly what you would see if these sets were in the hands of a playing child. But through the magic of youthful imagination those mundane backgrounds transform into something much more majestic and wonderful. I keep the fishing lines visible, and the door knobs and shelf brackets in frame, to remind us of just how powerful and beautiful that sense of childhood imagination is.
I hope you enjoy this website. I hope your children enjoy it. And I hope your parents enjoy it.
God bless,
LM.