The project needed more than mere technical insight. It needed a president of play. A fun foreman.
Lego Group design director Michael Fuller has been at the company for 18 years. “The Lego Batman Movie, that was five, six years of my life,” Fuller says. After wrapping the 2017 film, Fuller was trying to work out what he was going to do next when Donaldson approached him.
“I actually tried to convince him I wasn’t right for it. I’m not techie at all. I’m old-school. But Tom said, ‘No, that’s what we need. I’ve got lots of smart engineers and techie people. I need a toy guy.’”
And so Fuller was drafted in. “In the early days, I was just drawing concepts. I had a wall at Cambridge Consultants with hand-drawn concepts of ‘What if? What if? What if?’”
From there, they moved on to handmade prototypes, a phase Fuller estimates encompassed half of the total development time. “It was quite a small team of people, and you had to be resilient,” he says. This resilience was put to the test when early prerelease Smart Brick Jungle Explorers play sets were scrapped in favor of the eventual Star Wars models.
“These were actually out in the world,” Fuller says, holding up one of the boxes marked with TEST written in large red letters. “Kids did play with them. We got feedback. I went through evenings of telemetry, trying to work out which bits kids were really enjoying and which bits they weren’t so interested in.”
