Minifigures Guide

Minifigures (aka minifigs, figs or LEGO ® people) are a range of small plastic characters designed to fit with LEGO ®'s range of building bricks and associated sets. They are much collected by adults and children alike with rare ones being much sort after and often fetching high prices on eBay.

Minifigures were first produced by LEGO ® in 1974, the first figures being much simpler in design than the current offerings. Indeed, they had solid torsos and legs with no articulation unlike today's multi-jointed minifigs. Minifigures that were more recognisably modern were introduced in 1977 in the Space, Castle and Town themes. These still had simple painted expressions, with no variation. Over the years, increasing variation has been included in the minifigs, starting with 1989's Pirate series that had differing expressions and could have hooks (for hands) or wooden legs. Today, the range of differing figures is huge, presumably as LEGO ® have realised the potential of and demand for the figures. One suspects that the Star Wars effect has also had a large influence on this; LEGO ® Star Wars sets are amongst the most popular and Star Wars fans seem very keen on collecting accurate (in the strictly limited minifig way) representations of their favourite characters.

The current standard minifigure is made up of a number of components (torso, head, hips, arms, legs and hands) giving 7 points of articulation. They can connect to standard LEGO ® bricks in several ways, from standing on them to the hands and even head. A wide range of different hair and hats or helmets are produced, as are many accessories to be held by the minifigs' c-shape hands. These are appropriate to what the figure is representing, including guns and lightsabers for Star Wars characters. These accessories and standard LEGO ® brick connections allow for customisation of the minifigs – indeed there is a lot of interest in producing custom minifigures to represent characters LEGO ® do not produce.

With the expansion of the range has come many minifigs that do not fit the standard pattern – the Star Wars battle droids being a good example. These may also use standard LEGO ® pieces as well as specialist minifig pieces – a good example of this being the Star Wars Droideka. Larger minifigures have been produced, such as the Harry Potter Hagrid character. Some of the figures have unique moulded heads rather than the standard cylinder shape, including Yoda, Jar-Jar Binks and C3PO in the Star Wars sets. There are also the figures whose heads also cover part of the figures torso. Known as sandwich boards to the collector, these include ghosts (whose head piece cape actually covers the whole body), Wookies and Spongebob Squarepants characters. Female characters with solid brick 'legs' in the shape of a skirt have been produced, as have minifigs with shorter than usual legs (e.g. Yoda, SpongeBob).

All of which should go to show the wide range of available figures and give some indication perhaps of why they are so collectable – small, cheap, very varied and often representing characters from what are already very collectible areas – it is no great surprise they are so popular. They have even been use d in 'Brickfilms' to represent characters in films/ music videos and of course in computer animated form played the starring role in the hugely successful LEGO ® Star Wars series of games.