It's time to look back on the year past. 2008 has been a great year in LEGO, with lots of events, news and, most of all, great MOCs. I'd like to do a month-by-month review of the year on MinilandBricks.
I started this blog back in April, pretty much in response to seeing three great Miniland MOCs: Nathan Proudlove's Mystery Machine, Lino Martins' Batmobile and Steve Bishop's Futurama. These three builders have been a big part of this blog.
Okay, I think this is an older MOC, but in May I blogged Ochre Jelly's Stephen Hawking (I think the micro version was new at that time). Ochre has done a lot of building at the Miniland scale that's definitely worth checking out.
In June, Mainman posted this great scene: Ho Ho, Uh-Oh.
I suspect this was an older MOC, but also that month I blogged K-Hatch's Monsters.
In July we heard the announcement that there would be a new Legoland in Dubai. More recently we've heard that there will be another coming in Malaysia (I've yet to blog that).
Mention of Legoland makes me think of Master Model Builders of the past and present. In August, former MMB Mariann Asanuma started a blog, Model Building Secrets. Also in August I did a bit of a focus on MMB Gary McIntire, his quest for a job at Legoand, and several of his MOCs. Current MMB Kristi Klein also has a blog Brick Star, that gives a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the models at the park.
Hmm, I didn't do a lot of blogging in September. Life got pretty busy that month. This is a good place to note that the Lugnuts group on Flickr has been a great source for Miniland models. Every month they have a new building challenge, and several of the builders (Lino, Nathan and Ralph in particular) are fond of this scale, as you can get a lot more detail on vehicles than at the traditional minifig scale. This month the theme was "sympathy for the underdog," and one of the submissions was Lino's '57 Pontiac Safari.
Two new huge structures appeared this year and were on public display in October. Heather LEGO Girl's Dollhouse was shown at BrickCon and Yvonne Doyle, Steven Marshall and Pete Reid's Hospital was at the Great Western LEGO Show. Any summary of Miniland building would be lacking without a mention of Ralph Savelsberg, so I'll note here that this Ferrari Testarossa was his entry to the Lugnuts year in review challenge.
I feel that I'm being a bit of a Lino fanboy in this summary, but looking at November, I can't overlook his coulrophobia, which was probably my favorite Miniland-scale MOC that came out in 2008.
One of my favorite LEGO December traditions is MisaQa's advent calendars. A couple of years ago she did Dressy Dolls, and this year it was Fantasy Creatures. I'm still meaning to blog more of these.
I finished out the year with a run of Christmas-themed features, such as Steve Bishop's Nativity and Mariann Asanuma's Madonna and Child
Oh, one other quick news item on the year that I still need to blog is the creation in December of a Miniland Flickr Group. What a great year in MOCs, and I've still got a backlog to post. Looking forward to more in 2009.
