CUUSOO: The Adventures of Steamrod

The year, 1927, roughly a few years before the time “talkies” were about to become a global phenomenon, an Austrian filmmaker by the name of Friedrich Christian Anton Lang directed one of the single most important films in history simply titled “Metropolis”. At a cost of five million Reichsmarks (close to $1,200,000 in U.S. currency at the time), it was the most expensive motion picture ever released up to that point. An epic story telling about the lower class toiling away beneath the steel and asphalt of a glorious cityscape powered by their very actions housing the spoiled and privileged. This cult classic with an original running time of one hundred and fifty three minutes is the first ever feature length science fiction movie in history, and the oldest precursor known in the world of cinema for our subject.

From Jules Gabriel Verne’s incredible submersible named the Nautilus in an era where underwater travel was but an illusion, to Herbert George Wells’ contraption capable of traversing time and space itself coining the very phrase of “time machine”, to Michael Moorcock’s tales of a nomad roaming through the streams of time, all these aspired to the creation of a genre we like to call, steampunk. Although it took sometime in the late 1980s before the actual phrase came about, it has been in various literary works since the 19th century. A typical setting ranges from Victorian landscapes revolving around some form of alternate timeline in which the Industrial Revolution has already begun except electricity is not widespread.

Created by two of the people from Team Jigsaw behind the Thinking with Portals CUUSOO project, Nick V (Brick Thing) and Evan (Ehl-jay), and then submitted on February 6, 2013, The Adventures of Steamrod is the perfect culmination of steampunk in the form of our favorite medium, Lego.
 

The story revolves around Sir Jonathan Bolt, a distant relative to famous longtime adventurer Johnny Thunder, and his crusade amongst fellow comrades to recover long lost artifacts before the tyrannical Lord Sinistree and his army of Slybots gets to them first. Interestingly enough, Steamrod is actually the name of the heroes’ locomotive. The entire train with a coal car and laboratory carriage is constructed from over fifteen hundred pieces, sits at 25 inches long and 3 inches wide, and able to function on as well as off track.

On the side of the villians, the main man himself swoops in with his custom Sky-slizer.

While his conniving cohorts use a Slycycle and Gyroscopter.

I must say, I am beyond impressed with the imaginatively creative scope in character design and vehicular builds. Pre-rendered three dimensional representations or not, this is quite simply awe inspiring and a more than worthy concept to expand Lego’s line. This is a theme the company should have done years ago and I still find it somewhat baffling they have not tried to tackle this before. Granted, the steampunk fan base may be considered by some a small niche but so was Star Wars a long time ago. Even if kids might not understand everything about the genre, that does not mean they won’t enjoy themselves all the same.

This is only one of the many projects I gladly support and I hope you will too, friends.
Thank you.

Here is the Flickr gallery for more fantastic imagery.