Last time we went through Meccano, and Daniel mentioned a card in there about the toy that came second. This week he's gone back to another one.
The LEGO Cam.
That's what he called it, and I'll admit, I had to have this one explained to me twice. He and a friend, back around twelve or thirteen, spent what felt like months moving minifigures a hair at a time and pressing the capture button. Computers were enormous, software crashed constantly, and there was a genuine personal vendetta from the machine against the work. The whole thing ended with a CD that they treated like a premiere.
Which, in fairness, was an achievement.
It was the whole achievement. That was the Oscar. So the question Daniel's asking is: what was this thing, how ambitious was it to hand children a full filmmaking studio in 2000, why did it disappear, and how did the stop-motion hobby it accidentally started end up much bigger than the product ever was.
And the first answer is a beautiful contradiction, because if you look at the awards shelf, this toy was a smash hit.
Toy of the Year.
Toy of the Year and Innovative Toy of the Year at the 2000 TOTY awards. Two BAFTA Interactive awards the same year - best interactive children's and best interactive learning. PC Magazine gave it five out of five and called it exemplary. Somewhere around ten million dollars in US sales in the first year. And then the book on LEGO's innovation, Brick by Brick, describes the international release as a flop, with retailers marking sets down to get them off the shelves.
Award-winning and commercially doomed at once.
Every manufacturer's nightmare and every historian's gift.
So what was in the box, exactly. Set thirteen forty-nine.
Four hundred and forty-two pieces, seven minifigures, and one of those minifigures is Steven Spielberg. Complete with glasses, they listed that in the inventory. Plus a USB camera in a LEGO housing, a dolly, a steadicam rig, two studio lights, a fan, two small buildings, earthquake baseplates, ten flames, a vehicle, and two dinosaurs, a T. rex and a baby one, plus a mechanical dinosaur foot. It's a Jurassic Park kit that happens to have a camera in it.
The San Diego scene.
They built it so kids could recreate the T. rex attack on the trailers from The Lost World, in miniature, with their own hands on the camera. That's the pitch.
And the software side.
Joint project with Pinnacle Systems. It looked like a junior Premiere, or an iMovie with more knobs. Timeline, wipes, fades, titles, multiple audio tracks, a library of sound effects with the dinosaur roar and screeching tyres, and you could dub tracks off a CD. For the year 2000, on a family PC, that was not a toy-shaped feature set. That was a real editing suite.
Except the dinosaur roar arrived before the film it belonged to, since Jurassic Park three came out the year after.
Don't get ahead of me.
So walk me through what actually happened when the box came home, because I suspect the answer is: nothing, for about four hours, while the software installed.
The camera ran on a cable to the PC. There were two modes. You could shoot live, or you could do stop-motion, capture a frame, move the figure, capture another, and the software stitched them together so it played back as motion. For close-ups you moved the camera itself, by hand, and the kit gave you a track and a dolly to make that less hopeless.
And the poles.
Plastic poles that clipped onto the backs of the minifigures. You can't hold a figure steady and let go of it in the same instant, so you clip the pole on, hold the pole, move the figure, take your hands out of frame, and shoot. It's the trick every animator arrives at eventually. LEGO put it in the box.
Twenty minutes out of the box, Wired said.
Wired said a finished movie was possible twenty minutes out of the box, and called all of it an Easy-Bake Oven for budding auteurs. Which is a lovely line and very nearly true. What they left out is that the twenty minutes assumes nothing freezes, nothing crashes, and the lighting is already perfect.
How bad was the lighting problem.
The camera needed a lot of light to produce anything usable. Bright, direct, close light. It wasn't suited to what it was being asked to do, which was capture a small plastic figure, at close range, on a bedroom carpet, at whatever hour a twelve-year-old is allowed to be awake. That's the hardest possible case for a cheap sensor.
And the bugs.
Freezing, mostly. You would capture a run of frames, the program would hang, and whatever wasn't saved was gone. Not a crash that does you the mercy of losing everything at once - it froze often enough that you learned not to trust it between saves. People have written about this in the years since, and the phrase that keeps coming up is that it was very user friendly for kids and it froze most times you used it. Both of those are true.
That's a brutal combination.
It's the worst combination. A tool simple enough that a child understands it, and unstable enough that the child can't rely on it. The child concludes they're doing it wrong.
Which is exactly what Daniel remembers. Periodic system errors, the constant threat of losing the work, and the effort of getting everything to cooperate. He's describing himself as an unlucky kid. He was just an ordinary user of this product.
And that is the thing worth saying out loud, because he's not alone in the memory. The bugginess has been documented by people who went back and tried it again as adults. This wasn't user error. This was the experience.
Then there's the camera problem underneath the software problem.
The kit camera was LEGO's own, proprietary, in a brick shell - and if you tried to swap it for something better, you couldn't. It was locked down in a way that stopped anything else from being plugged in. The one component that didn't work well was the one component you were not allowed to replace.
That's a decision somebody made on purpose.
Somebody in a meeting decided the safest way to protect the experience was to make sure nobody could improve it.
So you could replace everything in the box except the part that was broken.
And people did try. The reports are that it simply would not accept a substitute. You plug a better camera into a free port and the software has no idea what you're talking about.
What about the output.
That's the other wound. A commenter on Brickset who'd used the set recalled the exported films coming out at a hundred and sixty by a hundred and twenty. For people listening who don't hold resolutions in their head, that's not much bigger than a large emoji. Months of work, and the finished film plays back in a box the size of a fingernail.
That's not a film, that's a contact lens.
It's the size the file could be. Something in the pipeline capped it there, and that was the finished product you burned to your CD.
So the CD Daniel treated like a premiere had a tiny movie on it.
Nearly the size of the thumbnail you'd draw on the disc itself.
And the demonstrations.
This is the bit that stings. The sample films that shipped with the set, the ones meant to show you what the thing could do, did not use the camera or the software that came in the box. LEGO's own demo was produced on better equipment. The toy was advertising a capability it didn't have.
The marketing cheated.
Any kid who watched the demo and then tried to reproduce it was being asked to reproduce something the manufacturer had already decided was beneath the demo.
So far we've got a kit that won everything, sold well enough to make ten million in one market, and shipped with a camera that couldn't be swapped and a resolution nobody would film a family holiday at.
Held together by software that froze. The ambition was right and the execution was sabotaged, and both of those are true at the same time.
What was the world this thing was launching into, though. Because I suspect it looked less insane on paper than it does now.
Nineteen-ninety-nine to two thousand was the exact moment digital photography stopped being specialist equipment and started being a product on a shelf. By the end of September 2000, two point one million digital cameras had been sold in the United States that year - up a hundred and twenty-one percent on the year before.
Doubling.
And household penetration doubled over 2000, to about a quarter of US internet households. Which means three quarters of the households with a computer and a phone line did not have a digital camera yet. That's the market LEGO was selling into.
What did the top of the range cost.
Canon announced the PowerShot S twenty in January of 2000, the first consumer three-megapixel camera. About nine hundred and fifty dollars at launch. That's the ceiling of the category, and LEGO's kit, with a camera in it, was a hundred and eighty.
So the camera in the box was the only camera plenty of families would have owned that year.
That's why the resolution wasn't the dealbreaker it sounds like now. There was nothing in the house to compare it to. It still wasn't good enough to do the thing it was sold for, but a family in 2000 picking it up had no frame of reference for how bad it was. They just knew the picture was small and the machine kept locking up.
And editing.
Video editing at home in 2000 was a hobby with a manual. If you wanted to cut a family video you were dealing with capture cards, codecs, dropped frames, and a machine that probably wasn't fast enough for the format you'd chosen. LEGO put a timeline with fades and titles in a box with a dinosaur in it.
That's the actual ambition. Not the toys - the software.
That's where the idea was ahead. The camera let it down, but the software was doing something almost nobody was offering children at the time, and doing it with a friendly face. Which is why the same people who complain about the crashes in those old forum posts also say the editor was a joy to use.
Then Spielberg.
It was only the second entertainment product he'd ever attached his name to. The first was a CD-ROM in ninety-six called Steven Spielberg's Director's Chair, which was itself about teaching people how films get made. So he had a pattern here - he liked the teaching part more than the licensing part.
And his money.
All of his proceeds went to the Starbright Foundation and the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. He wasn't taking a cut to put his face on a box. Confirmed by LEGO's own podcast years later.
He does that a lot.
The pattern with Spielberg is that he'll lend his name to something that teaches craft and then hand the fee to somebody else.
So you have the most famous director in the world putting his name on a toy that teaches eight-year-olds to frame a shot, giving the money away, and the product wins every award going and the international release still ends up in a discount bin.
The awards were real. The magazine reviews were real. PC Magazine ran a full five rating. AllGame gave it four and a half and said the search for the perfect shot could become addictive - which is the single best description of stop-motion anyone has written.
The search for the perfect shot. That's the hobby in five words.
And then it was gone by 2003. Fifty-five sets across the whole run, which sounds enormous for three years, and is - there were studios for explosions, backdrops, car stunts, a Temple of Gloom, a werewolf ambush, a pharaoh's curse, and licensed sets for Jurassic Park three and Spider-Man. Then nothing.
Why.
The bundle again. If the camera is bad and the software freezes, the child gets through maybe two weekends before they decide this is not the thing. And the parent, who paid a hundred and eighty dollars, remembers that too.
Somebody wrote that the camera and the software were what killed it. Without decent ones the interest didn't last.
That's the shape of it. Not a bad theme, not bad sets - the sets were fine. The set is bricks. Bricks always work. It was the electronics strapped to the front of the theme that failed, and by the time the theme had fifty-five sets, everyone knew.
The thing I keep circling back to - the hobby shows up almost immediately. Brickfilms dot com launches in December of 2000.
Sixteen days after the set hit stores, roughly. Jason Rowoldt founds the first brickfilming community, and coins the term brickfilm doing it. That's the origin of the word everybody uses now.
And the people in that community weren't using the LEGO camera.
They were using ordinary webcams. The ones that came built into laptops or clipped on top of monitors. Cheaper, more reliable, easier to point. LEGO's own competition ran a brickfilm contest in 2001 with more than seven hundred entries, and of the nine finalists only three of them used LEGO Studios.
Three out of nine.
Two thirds of the people entering LEGO's own competition had decided that LEGO's own product was not the way to make a brickfilm.
That's the verdict, and it was delivered by children, in LEGO's competition, in the first year.
The community had already solved the problem the product was built to solve. The set was the introduction, and the introduction was not the tool.
And the hobby didn't start with this thing either.
Not remotely. The earliest brickfilm anyone's found was made in 1973 - two Danish cousins, Lars and Henrik Hassing, made a short called A Journey to the Moon for their grandparents' wedding anniversary. Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, LEGO's owner at the time, had a personal copy of it made.
Which means LEGO knew, twenty-seven years before they sold a camera, that people were doing this. Somebody at the company had seen it and kept it on a shelf.
And then in the eighties there was The Magic Portal, a Lindsay Fleay film that mixed LEGO with live action and claymation. LEGO's response was warm at first and then became a legal threat. So the history of the company's relationship with this hobby is basically: they know, they don't know what to do with it, and it happens anyway.
What does a modern one look like, technically.
A digital still camera or a DSLR on a tripod, shot one frame at a time, at twelve, fifteen, or twenty-four frames per second. Fifteen frames is one second of finished film. The minifigure walk cycle has a standard four-frame rhythm that everybody uses because it reads as a walk and nobody has found a better one. Software like Stop Motion Studio or Dragonframe for capture, then compositing in something like After Effects.
Fifteen frames is one second.
Fifteen frames is one second, and a figure crossing a room is four seconds, which is sixty presses of a button for a couple of steps.
That's the piece that never changed. The camera got better, the software got cheaper, the number of button presses stayed exactly the same.
That's the craft. And the proof that the craft was always the point - LEGO's own films now pretend to be brickfilms. The Revenge of the Brick in 2005, and then The Lego Movie, which did four hundred and sixty-eight million dollars at the box office. A computer animated film that spends its whole budget pretending to have been shot the slow way, with fingerprints on the bricks.
The look became the brand.
And in 2017 they brought the product back. The LEGO Batman Movie Movie Maker Set. A phone stand and a backdrop. No camera. No software.
The smartphone ate the camera and the software both, and what's left is a piece of plastic to lean your phone against.
That's the whole evolution in one box. Everything that failed in 2000 moved into the device in your pocket, and LEGO stopped making it and started selling the stand.
And that's when the hobby outgrew the toy. Which is also the moment I remember you had something to say about this and haven't said it.
I've been waiting.
I know you have.
The word is camera.
You keep calling it a camera. It wasn't a camera. It was a piece of LEGO with a lens in it, and it talked to the PC over a proprietary connector. Not USB. I know the box said USB. The box said a lot of things.
The box, and the reviews, and the parts list all say USB, Hilbert.
I had one. I had the Pinnacle disc. It came already scratched, which I didn't notice for three days, because I spent the first weekend convinced the drive was at fault. It wasn't the drive. Somebody had put a coaster in the box and shrink-wrapped it.
You opened it and the disc was scratched.
Deep scratch, right across the middle. Lent a disk, most likely. I've seen it before. Anyway, once I got an installer to run off the scratch, it asked for a version of Windows I didn't have. A specific one. I had the wrong one.
Which one did you have?
The wrong one. That's the point. And the thing you said about the click track - the roar. That wasn't from a dinosaur film. It was the same roar everyone was using that year because it came bundled on a sound library, and it turned up all over television. Whoever licensed it to LEGO licensed it to everybody. So the mystery you've got is not a mystery.
That's... actually a fair point about sound libraries.
It's not a fair point, it's the answer.
Hilbert, is the disc still around?
It's in a wallet with the rest of the Pinnacle disks. I've been meaning to get it going again. I've got a weekend cleared in November and a machine under the desk that's the correct era for it. Bought it off an auction site in August. Fan sounds like a hairdryer but the drive reads everything.
You bought a computer for the disc.
I bought a computer that matches the disc. It's a different problem. The modern laptop refuses the installer outright. That's not a weekend, that's a wall.
And the camera.
Camera's not the problem. Never was.
The camera is entirely the problem.
No. The camera worked. The camera was fine.
Hilbert.
The camera was fine and the software was a young man's software. You can't build an editing suite out of hope.
So we now have an anteater telling two animals that the component everybody else found unusable was fine, and the software everyone else found usable was the problem.
I've had worse weekends.
All right. So let's take the actual point. The CD that Daniel burned, wherever it is, is a relic of a specific moment - a moment where producing a few seconds of animation could swallow an afternoon, and everybody accepted that as the cost of entry.
Nineteen days after the set hit shelves, somebody had already started a community for the people who wanted to keep doing it without it.
Which is the tell. The demand was real. The tool was the wrong tool.
Put it next to the Meccano conversation - you have two toys that were never really toys. Meccano gave a child a working structure. LEGO Studios gave a child a finished film. Both of them took a real skill and wrapped it in cardboard.
And the difference between them, in the end, is that Meccano's parts still did the job.
But look at what carried. The camera broke, the software froze, the resolution was a thumbnail, and the entire business was discontinued in three years. The hobby outlived it by a wide margin - first on webcams, then on stills cameras, then on phones - and it was never really the equipment doing the carrying.
Chris Salt said it in a way that doesn't need improving - all you need is a base plate, a figure, and a camera to point at it. That's the entire requirement, and it was true in 1973, and it'll be true when the next version of the stand comes out.
And LEGO finally said it themselves, years later, talking about what these product lines were for. Introducing kids to something that wasn't just a toy to play with. Something that could give them a skill, and a way of looking at the world. They knew what they were doing in 2000. They just shipped the wrong camera with it.
The commonest thing people get wrong about this is that it was a niche failure nobody bought.
It won Toy of the Year, it won the two BAFTAs, it made ten million in the States in year one. It failed in Europe, at retail, and that's what killed the range. It was a hit that got discontinued, which is a different animal from a flop.
The second thing people get wrong is that they remember the camera as a webcam.
It was locked down. You couldn't swap it. That was deliberate, and it turned out to be the whole problem, because the one part LEGO wouldn't let you replace was the bit that didn't work.
One forward thought. The 2017 set is a phone stand and a backdrop. No camera, no software, no royalties, no Pinnacle. LEGO finally shipped the version of this product that works, and it works because everything that failed in 2000 is now in the pocket of the person using it.
Which is a strange way to win. The toy loses the components and the hobby wins them back as a phone.
That's the arc. Thanks, as always, to Hilbert Flumingtop, who produces this and owns a laptop adjacent to the year 2000 for reasons we've now examined.
He'll get it running.
He won't. If this was your kind of episode, go back for episode ninety-one, The Story Behind the Show; episode ten, How ASR Went From Frustration To ... Whisper Magic; and episode twelve, The AI Breakthrough. This has been My Weird Prompts. If you've got a childhood relic you want pulled apart, send it to us on Telegram at t dot me slash MWP listener bot. We'll be back soon.
