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The Unofficial LEGO® Builder’s Guide > 4. Miniland Scale: The Whole World in Mi...
In 1968, something spectacular happened in Denmark: an entire new world was created. That was the year the LEGO company opened a very unique theme park, called LEGOLAND, not far from its headquarters.
Note
Denmark is a small Scandinavian country located north of Germany and Poland, bordered by both the Baltic and the North Seas. It is the country in which LEGO was founded in 1932, and it remains home to the company’s corporate headquarters.
Along with rides and snack shops, LEGOLAND also contained an incredible group of LEGO structures. This part of the park became known as Miniland. In the early days of the park, these Miniland creations replicated—at scale, of course—many famous Danish landmarks and buildings. Later, as the company opened other theme parks in more countries, new Miniland structures were built, modeled after other cities and structures from around the world. In Figure 4-1 you can see an interesting scene captured at LEGOLAND in Carlsbad, California.
Figure 4-1. Don’t worry: things aren’t as bad as they seem. This fire truck is only a couple of feet long, its ladder is just under 3 feet tall, and the people in the scene are each less than 4 inches high. The details are what make it look very real. (Photo by Tim Strutt, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Used with permission.)
Interestingly, even though miniland scale is used extensively in the LEGO parks, you won’t really find any official LEGO sets that contain miniland-scale characters. Equally notable is that unlike the very specialized pieces that make up any given minifig, miniland people are most often created from a variety of reasonably common LEGO elements. They may have parts such as inverted slopes for legs, plates for arms, or even 1x1 cylinder plates for eyes.
