geekosystem

Happy Father's Day to all the dad's out there. To celebrate, LEGO has released this charming video showing Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader getting in a little father/son time. It's as adorable as you'd expect from LEGO, and a nice way to celebrate the day with your geeky dad. Full disclosure: This might just be because it's my first Father's Day as a new dad, but I teared up a little bit.

Compared to Nerf guns and violent video games, LEGOs are a pretty harmless toy for children to play with, right? Not so, according to researchers at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Since the building blocks were first introduced to the masses in 1978, their happy yellow faces have been getting angrier and angrier over the years. Oh no. Are we on the verge of a LEGO revolution? Those little guys have got to be planning something.

LEGO and Marvel have been joining forces recently to make my eleven-year-old self foam at the mouth with rabid glee. First they put out the amazing Super Hero minifigure sets last year (now's where I would brag about my Hawkeye minifigure if I knew where the heck I put it). Then they released the trailer for the Marvel Superhero LEGO PC game. Now they've announced that in September, several comic book titles will put out LEGO variant covers featuring your favorite characters all adorable and LEGO-fied. I'm not a big variant collector, but I might camp out at my local comic book store for these.

They've been accused of being the Jar-Jar Binks of their day, but I love the Ewoks. That's why I'm so excited to hear about LEGO's new offering -- The Ewok Village. It's a beautifully detailed 1,990 brick model complete with traps, hideouts, and even an elevating throne. The set even comes with 16 minifigs so you can relive all your favorite Endor scenes. I want this real bad. Real. Bad.

This Wednesday night, Cartoon Network is premiering the new animated series LEGO Star Wars: The Yoda Chronicles. To celebrate the new show LEGO unveiled a life-sized LEGO replica of an X-Wing fighter in Times Square. We'll give you all the specs on this beauty in a second, but first -- try to guess how many bricks it took to build. Go on. Guess.

While sometimes we long for the days when LEGO sets didn't always tie in to popular franchises and children had to use their imaginations to play with them, we're generally in favor of themed sets -- after all, having LEGO-fied versions of your favorite heroes and villains pretty much rocks. The creators of Brotherhood Workshop must agree, because their YouTube channel is filled with amusing stop motion LEGO videos that feature characters from Lord of the Rings and, most recently, Harry Potter.

Using just LEGO and Bionicle pieces, builder Robiwan Kenobi has crafted the LEGO answer to any problem -- the LEGO Swiss Army knife. The contraption features a LEGO blade, saw, toothpick and what looks to be a screwdriver arm, all of which fold in and out of the body, just like a real Swiss Army knife. The only thing it won't do is actually cut anything, but come one -- how often do you use a Swiss Army knife for that?

Breaking Bad is one of the best shows on television, and LEGO is one of the best toy/entertainment companies around. It's pretty obvious why we love this mashup of the two by Brian Anderson. It combines all the charm and fun of LEGO with all of the meth and violence of Breaking Bad. The video warns that it has spoilers for seasons one through four, but if you listened to the first episode of the Geekosystem podcast, you'll know that I think that's your own problem at this point.

Word's been out on the Internet since at least January about an official Lord of the Rings Tower of Orthanc LEGO set thanks to a few images making the rounds, but now it's officially official: LEGO's announced their two-foot-tall Tower of Orthanc set. They take a few liberties, so be prepared for a few very upset Tolkien scholars.

LEGO is one of those companies that constantly and consistently produce odds and ends that are worth purchasing. They're also notorious for supporting whatever's going on in popular culture with themed sets. Case in point, the company's revealed that a new Star Wars X-wing starfighter set will be coming out in May! Rejoice! Probably the only unfortunate part is the cost, but if you're a real enthusiast that shouldn't stop you, should it?

I'm not going to pretend that I've ever -- and I do mean ever -- been interested in learning how a loom looms. It's one of those things that's best described as one of life's smallest mysteries that aren't actually a mystery. There are surely people out there that know how a loom functions in great detail. That said, this video of a LEGO Mindstorm loom in action is surprisingly fascinating. See the LEGO loom loom!

If you're a student between the ages of 13 and 18 with an interest in science, then grab your lab coat and get to work. Google is taking submissions for their third annual Google Science Fair as of today. They've partnered up with CERN, LEGO, National Geographic, and Scientific American to offer some truly amazing prizes that include scholarships, an expedition to the Galapagos, and a week shadowing a particle physicist at Fermilab.

YouTube is rife with a plethora of stop motion LEGO films, ranging from the thoroughly entertaining to outright abysmal. Still, a majority of them aren't any longer than 10 minutes since not everybody is willing to devote hours of their time tediously making small LEGO figurines move across a table. Though we can't speak for the dedicated folks behind the feature length fan film Castlevania IV: Legend of Vania. Created by Hovinet Films -- a small studio consisting of three brothers from Finland -- Castlevania IV was a seven-year labor of love that runs for a whopping 146 minutes! Believe us, after watching the movie, you'll have a conflicting urge to start playing with LEGOs and play Castlevania on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Decisions, decisions...

LEGO's just released the summer review results from their CUUSOO website, which is a system where modelers can submit their creations in the hopes that they'll eventually become actual sets. Once a submission manages 10,000 votes from the community, LEGO reviews them and makes a call on whether they move forward with the project. That's how that sweet Minecraft LEGO set came to fruition. One of those in the spotlight this time around was an impressive Back to the Future DeLorean model. You can probably see where this is going. Yes, a Back to the Future LEGO set is really, truly happening.

We got really excited when LEGO came out with a The Hobbit Bag End set over the summer, but it was just so small! Sure it's fun to build tiny LEGO versions of things, but sometimes you just want to climb inside them and play along with your LEGO pals. To do that though, you either need a shrink ray or you need to build gigantic versions of LEGO sets. Most people don't have the resources for either option, but LEGO sure does. They just released photos of a life-size version of their Bag End set, and we really want to play in it. They probably also have a shrink ray. LEGO's pretty awesome like that.