With the record breaking "The Simpsons" marathon set to begin on FXX August 21 and the 26th season of the show set to premiere later this year, it is a good time to be a fan of the longest-running scripted television show in history. One fan is celebrating in his own special way -- by painstakingly making a LEGO recreation of the Simpsons' hometown of Springfield, USA.
While there are official LEGO "Simpsons" sets for sale, like the Simpsons house that comes complete with LEGO mini-figures of the whole Simpsons family, it is just a tiny piece of a much larger fictional city that has yet to be realized in small bricks. With that in mind, one LEGO master builder and "Simpsons" fan by the name of Matt De Lanoy decided to take it upon himself to bring the entire town to life with his personal LEGO collection. The results are amazing.
Many of the show's iconic locations and landmarks are featured: from the Kwik-e-Mart to Krusty Burger, the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant to Ned Flanders' house, it is all here, painstakingly recreated in tiny brick form.
Better yet, there is so much crammed into every nook and cranny of the recreation that it is a joy just to find all the little details. De Lanoy uses the official LEGO Simpson minifigures and sprinkles them throughout the piece, with Homer working at the power plant while Marge can be seen at home. Other LEGO figures round out the population of the city, with guest appearances from Marvel superheroes like Thor and Hulk, who can be seen enjoying a meal inside Krusty Burger.
You can check out the entire image gallery on Flickr, but be warned: you may be there a good long while looking through each and every picture and admiring the insane level of detail crammed into every building. De Lanoy also created a time lapse video of him building the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant brick by brick, which gives a good idea of just how long something of this size and scale takes to make. If the power plant took him close to four hours to create, how long do you think the entire city took to build? A long, long time.
If you can't get enough of "The Simpsons" be sure to catch the 12-day straight marathon of the show August 21 on FXX, though it might be good to remember that in that same amount of time spent watching TV, you could be building something incredible like this.
