I wrote a review of Lego Star Wars: Revenge of the Brick on Letterboxd and decided it was too nice for just that site. I’m reposting it here!
I remember seeing an ad for Lego Star Wars: Revenge of the Brick in a magazine. If you knew ten-year-old me, this was an extremely very big deal. Star Wars Episode 3 was about to come out and I was absolutely ravenous for any piece of media connected to it. I watched the trailers incessantly, visited Starwars.com every single day, rewatched the Clone Wars microseries on Shockwave Flash player once a week, played every single minigame on the Hasbro website several times over, replayed the old Gamecube game a couple times… I forced my parents to plan their whole lives around the Clone Wars Volume 2, five nights right at 7 PM, and those meaty 12-minute episodes that felt like they lasted for an hour each–I was NOT missing them. I wanted an Xbox specifically just to play the demo of Star Wars Battlefront that came on my Original Trilogy DVD, and begged unsuccessfully for one for over a year.
But this thing? This was never mentioned in any of the promotional material I devoured. I just happened to find it in a magazine. I was instantly at high-pitch excitement for it, like it was going to be some full TV special of 22 or 45 minutes and I’d get even more Star Wars content shoved in my eyeballs before the main movie came out that May. It’s weird that I never saw any commericals for it, or any ads on the Star Wars website, but hey, I’ll take what I can get. So I again sat in front of my TV, avidly waiting on Cartoon Network…
But… the listing wasn’t for Star Wars… it was for Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends??? My local cable company was probably just wrong, but then the episode began. A rerun. I sat, confused, until the first commerical break.
And then Lego Star Wars: Revenge of the Brick came on and ended after like five minutes.
I was just… so confused. Baffled. It never left my mind that this blatant toy commerical with next to no plot and C-tier humor had advertised itself in a random magazine and I thought it was going to be a huge event. Utter betrayal at the hands of… that one magazine I coincidentally flipped through? Cartoon Network? Lego? Lucasfilm? I didn’t even know who to blame…
Watching it now, it’s totally nothing. There’s just nothing to it except to promote the Lego Star Wars sets out at the time. It was a nice bonus on the Clone Wars Volume 2 DVD, but other than that it’s completely forgotten, and there’s a reason for it. My past self would feel vindicated that it got buried for how much it disappointed me.
Read some more of my awesome blog posts:
Horrific! It’s always sad when Kid You/Me thinks they’ll be the coolest person on the playground, or the message board they are maybe technically not old enough to be using, only to find that it was just an advertisement to drink more Ovaltine.
We are all Ralphie in our own way