— By Dede Williams — 

Moving out of its quiet playroom corner, Danish toymaker Lego (Billund; www.lego.com) has recently registered rising demand from adult hobbyists eager to recreate their favourite monuments in plastic.

Next to the building kits for Edinburgh’s Forth Bridge in Scotland and the flame-scorched Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, kits for Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia reportedly will soon line store shelves, so that the Catalan artist’s famous Barcelona cathedral, a perennial “work in progress”, might one day actually be completed!

But what hold, some ask, does cultural tradition have on society’s favourite belligerent pastime? The stereotypically peaceful Danes are now “celebrating war” on the internet – with genuine-looking Lego figures made of commodity plastic ABS, PC, PP or PE.

As far as anyone knows, there is no cross-connection between the plastic brick specialist and the AI-generated “Lego videos”, as fans and critics alike colloquially call the carefully crafted and immensely popular animated spots currently fascinating the denizens of TikTok or Instagram. The company has been mum on the subject.

In the action pieced together by teams of Iranian graphic artists, battleships speed through the Strait of Hormuz, and virtual missiles rain down on the blond crown topper of US President Donald Trump as an unseen adversary mocks him and his politics. One contribution shows US defence secretary Pete Hegseth as a merrily drunken sailor.

As the script invariably goes, Iran wins and the US loses every skirmish. Still, the artists maintain that the videos are not dictatorial “slopaganda”, as some Western commentators see it.

While perspective is always in the eye of the beholder, some Danes might be prepared to embrace the Middle East creators if Trump makes another move on Greenland...