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Lego MOC: Ewok Adventureland



Yub-nub! 

What did the Ewoks do with all the junk the Empire left behind after the Battle of Endor? Build a galaxy-class theme park, of course!

This collaborative build was 5 ft wide x 3.75 ft deep x approximately 5 ft tall and was on original concept by my friend Boone Langston. The first and only showing of the full creation was during Bricks Cascade 2020 (February 27 to March 1) in Portland, Oregon.


Photo credit: Will Nickleson

The Concept

Boone and I are life-long Star Wars fans. Boone shared about the first time he saw Return of the Jedi:

"The first time I saw ROTJ, it was on all the television sets at some department store in Tucson. I just sat there and watched while mom and dad looked at furniture or appliances or something. I’m pretty sure that was my first exposure to anything Star Wars and I was mesmerized! I didn’t want to leave that store when they were done shopping. I think that’s why ROTJ and the Ewoks have always been my favorites!"

Over dinner in Summer 2019, Boone and I sketched up what an Ewok-run theme park might look like. We knew we wanted tall trees, rides, the iconic shield generator bunker and a monorail. Beyond that, we knew there should be some rides but we didn't know what they would be. Ultimately we ended up with 4 animated rides: a roller coaster, monorail, TIE fighter Ferris wheel and probe droid spinner.

We knew the Ewoks should be running the park, and that all guests (Imperial and Rebel) were welcome. So all of the minifigs are on vacation! No weapons. Just hats, ice cream, drinks and cameras.


The Layout

I created the front two-thirds of the layout. That includes the landscape/terrain, the Ferris wheel and probe droid spinner. Behind the spinner is an AT-ST that is stuck in a pond - an inspiration from The Mandalorian series. The Ferris wheel has a TIE fighter wing on the side that I built from scratch. It took a few tries to get the geometry correct. Then I added AT-AT legs to hold it up. The carriages for the Ferris wheel are modeled after the various TIE fighter cockpits LEGO has released over the years, including a black and red version from Force Awakens.

LEGO Fairground Carousel


The probe droid spinner is based on the LEGO Fairground Carousel (which has a UFO on top). I thought the UFO looked a little like the head of the Imperial probe droid from Empire Strikes Back. I knew it had to carry speeder bikes and tried a few variations of motors to get it to spin fast enough to lift its arms up. It's wildly out of scale with the rest of the MOC. Thankfully our build was so nuts that nobody was asking questions about scale or logistics (like, "how did the Ewoks figure out how to build a monorail?"). Boone programmed a single Mindstorms NXT to control both the Ferris wheel and spinner to have offset and varied speeds so that something would always be running, and the rides had a chance to cool down. The programmed pacing also reduced wear on the system, an important consideration when your ABS parts are moving nearly full time for a 4-day event.

The landscape was a challenge for me. I had only built in grays and white, and so I had hardly any brown and tan in my parts collection. I looked at a lot of pictures of the forest they shot the movie in, and took walks in our own forests here in Oregon. Endor MOCs I've seen tend to have too much green for my taste, since in reality the forest is such a crazy mix of drab colors. The redwoods are not red, nor brown. They almost look like gray concrete tinted with brown and red. The forest floor is often made up of gray stones covered in bright green moss, with patches of brown everywhere. It was a challenge to figure out how to scale this properly. In my section I landed on a lot of brown, gray, dark tan with touches of sand green, and light tan.

Boone created the rear one-third of the layout. He took on the ambitious challenge of creating very tall trees that had both roller coaster and monorail weaving around them. The roller coaster's vertical lift was a concept Boone had in his head for quite some time (possibly years), and we knew we'd do it for Ewok Adventureland back in summer 2019. In late 2019, Boone and Mark were selected for the show LEGO Masters USA, which began shooting in October for roughly 7 weeks. When I visited them in Los Angeles at about the 2-week point, Boone told me their first challenge was a theme park. He was able to test out the vertical lift concept on what would become known as Timber Town. Unfortunately it didn't work during judging, but he knew it was possible to make a lift work, especially if he had more time to work with (they had just 15 hours for Timber Town). Boone's roller coaster for Ewok Adventureland is a complete from-scratch rebuild of the Timber Town version, with improved electronics, motors, construction and engineering.

Screen grab from Timber Town

The Ewok revision has a few major changes over Timber Town:
  • Revised, stronger construction for the core structure.
  • Replacement of Powered Up with Mindstorms EV3 system; Doing this also let us plug in to wall power, which is helpful for a 2-day expo. The EV3 seems to shut itself off every hour though, so we had to turn it back on from time to time.
  • Addition of a second motor for the vertical lift.
  • Removal of the vertical shaft that kept the coaster cars from rolling off the trolley as it lifts up; Ewok uses a lift gate that mechanically lifts at the top.
  • Removing the vertical shaft also lets the trolley move around as it pleases during the ride to top - removing the need for any kind of guide rails and prevents issues with binding and friction.
  • Addition of guides at the top and bottom to align the trolley with the incoming/outgoing coaster tracks.
Boone also created the monorail layout that runs up the 2 big trees and around the front of the layout. He's been collecting track for years and we love that we were able to run it just behind the entrance bunker, similar to the elevated railroad that runs above the Disneyland entrance. Monorail is so forgiving with height changes and is a rock solid performer. It never broke down and 2 batteries got us through 4 days. No wonder people want LEGO to bring back the monorail system!

Speaking of Disneyland, it was a major inspiration of our design. We wanted the main attractions to be visual icons that anchored various areas, and we added an homage to the "Partners" statue of Walt and Mickey.

Boone enlisted fellow LEGO Masters cast members Flynn and Richard to build a sign for the layout. The only instruction we gave them was "make it bold, make it Vegas" and boy did they deliver. They created a beautiful sign filled with parts of speeder bikes, AT-AT legs, AT-ST legs and is topped by a rotating "sign on a sign" that has the Endor planet from LEGO set 9679. They built it in Oakland and flew it up to the show. They performed some final greebleing and wowed us with lights that actually pulse & glow. The sign is stunning! I really enjoyed spending time with them and seeing how gracious they are with each other and their fans.


On site at the show, Mark Cruickshank added trees, greenery and huts. Sam Hatmaker placed minifigs including a clever use of the minifigure posing part to make this ride-goer lose his hat!


We added so much greenery detail that we ended up coining a new word: "greenble-ing" ... a great alternative is "treeble-ing"!

Kyle Donovan added an Easter Egg - some Mon Calamari caught in a net!

Our set up was on Thursday and Friday in prep for the public expo on Saturday and Sunday. On Thursday we realized that Flynn and Richard's sign would be a challenge to mount safely above the layout. Over lunch we discussed various solutions using Technic and standard LEGO elements, but couldn't quite land on a solution that solved the issues of weight distribution and strength. Our friend Mike Johnson (a professional wood worker) overheard us talking and offered to build us a custom structure overnight. He and his wife Sarah took rough measurements and returned the next morning with a finished walnut frame and some tools. The color and fitment was perfect. He did final cuts and assembly, and we were in business!




Dark Mode

The builders that attend Bricks Cascade get to see something the public doesn't - a period where we dim the hall lights and enjoy the new personality the lighted MOCs take on. Seeing the MOC lit up reminded me of the first time I saw Disneyland at night. It felt like a completely different park, with the castle, Matterhorn and Thunder Mountain Railroad coming alive in new ways. Our rides projected moving shadows up into the trees and the lights created pockets of campfire-like vignettes.









Reaction

The public reaction was beyond what we could have hoped. Many people were excited to see Boone, Flynn and Richard, and the build gave them a home base to show off their considerable skill. I loved hearing them talk about their work, and even the introvert in me enjoyed talking up a storm. By the end of the show I had lost my voice!

Over the course of 4 days, here's how the roller coaster performed:
  • Day 1. Set up day. We had 2 cars in the roller coaster, with the trolley set to lift every 25 seconds. This "cool down" time made the lift more of a moment to look forward to, and greatly reduced the wear on the system. A sensor let the system know the car had made it back to the bottom of the lift, and start the 25 second countdown. The coaster worked for a few hours flawlessly. Then at the top of the lift, only 1 car would properly exit the trolley due to track alignment. The trolley would descend anyway, causing a violent separation of the 2 cars and sending 1 or both of the cars flying into the layout. Think about those horror movies where an elevator stops and people try climbing out the main doors anyway ... that's what happened.
  • Day 2. 2nd set up day. We got the 2 cars working again, but eventually decided to just run 1 car. That worked really well for several hours.
  • Day 3. 1st public expo day. The 1 car ran very well for hours, but started to have alignment issues at the bottom. So the car would only half-enter the trolley. That car would still trigger the sensor and the trolley would go up, throwing the car into the layout. So we ran it supervised for most of the day.
  • Day 4. 2nd public expo day. We ran it the same way for most of the public hours, but had to supervise it closely to make sure the bottom was aligned. The top always worked. As is the case with LEGO's coaster track, the car started to slow on the flatter curves. I saw it hang once or twice and we could usually fix it with a minor tweak to the track angles. Near the end of the day, the car fell off the trolley and became lodged under the trolley. When I went to fix it, the entire gray tread portion snapped and buckled at the rear. I was terrified it was going to bring down the entire lift tower. Then it got worse. The loose tread ended up covering the monorail track, which then derailed the monorail! Mike saw what was happening and between the two of us we were able to fix everything. It was a scary moment for sure and could have been even worse. We were working in a portion of the build where clamps were holding Mike's wood frame to prevent the entire sign structure from tipping forward. Had we bumped those clamps or the table too hard, we could have sent the sign crashing down into the layout. This entire close call happened while a blissfully unaware Boone was just steps away at the LEGO Masters meet and greet area. 

By the final morning of Bricks Cascade, the probe droid started to wobble and squeak, since it was starting to wear out the plastic. I was able to consult John, one of our Technic gurus and ask him if he thought the spinner could last one more day. He reviewed the mechanisms carefully and decreed, "yes, probably." The generosity of fellow AFOLs to impart wisdom is part of what makes Bricks Cascade so great.

Boone prepared a 20 minute looping playlist that featured the two main Ewok-related tracks from Return of the Jedi, plus a few covers of the "Yub Nub" Ewok Celebraton song. The playlist could be heard booming out of a large speaker under our table. In an earlier version of the playlist, Boone included theme music from the Ewoks animated TV show as well as songs from the two live action Ewok TV movies, Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor. Ultimately I'm glad we didn't play the more obscure version, since we all had to listen to the playlist for something like 10-12 hours over the course of the weekend.

One of my favorite moments was watching a young boy who studied our MOC for over an hour, with his father patiently watching. It reminded me of a favorite memory from when I was a kid, when our family stumbled on a behind-the-scenes exhibit for The Jim Henson company at the California Museum of Science and Industry. A huge hall was filled with puppets, props, costumes, workshops and sets from Sesame Street and The Muppet Show. I spent a very long time in there, soaking up everything I could about how these artists turned a fantasy into reality -- it fueled my interests to this day. I appreciated my parents letting me linger and never once nudging us to go home. That's what this father did for his son that day in front of our MOC, and I told him how much I appreciated my own father for doing that for me.



Recognition

  • People's Choice Winner for Bricks Cascade 2020. This is an honor voted on by the public that visit the 2 expo days of the show. There were a record 12.5k people that visited us on those days! 
  • Star Wars Theme Award for Best Scene. The award name is "The force will be with you. Always."
  • GayFOL trophy. This appeared at our table on the last day!
  • Mini-scale build created by Simon Liu featuring plaid-clad Boone and Mark. Simon built this in 1 hour during a freestyle build game out of LEGO set 41597 BrickHeadz - Go Brick Me.

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