Jens Nygaard Knudsen - creator of LEGO minifigures, passed away
Minifigures are my favorite thing about LEGO bricks. They allow for great fun, setting them up in various scenes and gestures, and decorating each block building.
I also like minifigures because of their interchangeability between sets and for the fact that they are often the smallest thing that we can buy to our blocks without much money - especially since for several (next?) Years we will also find handbags with figurines on our market - surprises .
Their creator in modern form was Jens Nygaard Knudsen, who unfortunately, as reported by the LEGO Group on Twitter, died.
https://twitter.com/LEGO_Group/status/1231941903849009152
Knudsen's merit was the construction of minifigures in such a form that they had movable arms and legs and interchangeable parts. Yes, it is thanks to Knudsen since 1978 that we can, for example, put Voldemort in the hands of a lightsaber.
The first minifigures, in the form we know now, belonged to the Castle, Space and Town series that have been continued to this day. All the figurines in the first series were designed by Jens - and it was he who designed them a simple facial expression. Thanks to this famous face designed with dots and strokes, the identity and sex of the figurine depended on the imagination of the playing child (or adult). Who among us did not replace the hairstyle of the figurine with a completely new quality?
Interestingly, figurines only since 2003 have other colors than "plain yellow". Dark figures appeared to reflect basketball league players in the LEGO Basketball series and ... they stayed with us forever, thanks to which Star Wars Fin can stand on my desk.
Jens Nygaard Knudsen died at age 78 of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). His former LEGO colleague, designer Niels Milan Pedersen , mentions him like this:
His imagination was extraordinary - he wasn't brainstorming - these meetings were more like a hurricane
Knudsen worked in the LEGO Group from 1968 to 2000 and was involved in the design of blocks, sets and minifigures throughout his professional career. He worked, among others, on the Space and Pirates series.
It is Jens that we owe to the fact that buildings, houses, spaceships and ships built from LEGO blocks are not empty, but populated with small, expressive little people.
Jens Nygaard Knudsen - creator of LEGO minifigures, passed away
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