"I tried to think of the most harmless thing. Something I loved from my childhood. Something that could never, ever possibly destroy us. Mr. Stay Puft."

I'm quite sure many of us have got that one friend that no matter how much effort they put into life they just cant seem to catch a break. Mines called Steve! After meeting him one afternoon in our local toy store we got chatting and our friendship blossomed from there over a love of LEGO, Movies, Games and many other geeky things that we have in common. Steve is the kind of guy that will just continue to graft in his work life despite what is thrown at him, and it has seemed like over the last few years, the obstacles that have been placed in his way have become a lot more frequent. Whenever I go an see him though he always has a smile on his face.

The last few months for him have been a little harder than usual with being away from his family due to work commitments and I like to think that as a friend I've always been there to help him out when he (and his family) have needed it. I really wanted to do something special to put a huge smile on his face though, so in my classic brick lovin' style I hit the LEGO.

Steve is usually the first person outside of the house to see anything that we have created with those magical bricks, and has been a huge fan of the custom Death star's that we have created over the years. If you remember a few years back, he was the chap that created the LEGO arcade with me, housing the first Death star that the boys and I had built. Well in all fairness he built the entire thing and took care of all the electrics etc (I just threw some Lego on it), He's such a smart guy, it just always seems like the world is stacked against him.

For years Steve has been making off the cuff comments about me building him a Death star, Id always loved the idea he had had for one and knew that I would inevitably build it. Recent events though gave me all the motivation I needed to get going.

Steve's idea: A retro Death star using all of the great characters released in the dimensions range.

Luckily they were all TV shows and movies from my childhood so I was excited to get stuck in. It gave me a great excuse to watch them all over again too (because what else was I going to do with my evenings?). As I said before, I knew that I would eventually start this, so for the last few months I had been picking up the Dimensions kits that I needed in preparation.

As soon as I had built all the floors for each section of the build (which is by far the most boring part) I was ready to let my creative juices flow . The boys sat and watched all the movies with me (apart from Beetlejuice) and came up with some amazing ideas. The bottom floor of the Death star build can be a little wasted, as unless you have it up high you cant really see whats going on, I really wanted to make the most of it though, So for the first room I created the scene from Ghostbusters, the part when they have dug up the street and are lowering Ray into the sewers and he finds the river of pink slime. This was great as I could make the bottom level look like a sewer. As soon as I had built it Opeie said 'Dad, didn't you watch ninja turtles before school when you were little?, you could put them in the sewer!' Which I thought was a great idea. So I added in an upper sewer tunnel with Michelangelo skateboarding out, which fit into the build perfectly.

The A-team was one of the highlights of my Saturday afternoon when I was younger and With Mr. T being released for Dimensions, I had to build the other 4 characters and somehow add the iconic truck into the build. It was at this point where I really started getting into the creation .

I had originally wanted to make the classroom scene from ET as one of the things that stuck out most for me was the little girls face with the frogs around her, but as that scene didn't include ET it was clear that I needed to go for the spaceship scene where ET finally 'goes home'. I didn't want to leave the frogs out though so I had the girl standing in the section surrounded by frogs anyway.

With the way this build comes together, building each quarter at a time and then working upwards is quite exciting when you get to the next level as it all starts taking shape and you realise how big the finished build is going to be. The Goonies was the section that I was looking forward to building the most as it was (and still is) my favourite film growing up. I was a little disappointed that LEGO had only released Sloth with the Dimensions pack but I still managed to build the Goonies despite their outfits not being spot on. The boys were playing and they were using LEGO dynamite and I had a eureka moment for what I was going to build for the section.

Steve is massively into retro gaming and all things arcade so I wanted to include an arcade into the build which I also thought would be a great spot to put a minifigure of himself in. The boys decided that I should be in there too as I was building it so they made a LEGO Steve and a 'daddy figure' to live in the arcade.

I was really looking forward to building a Back to the future section but it ended up being such a stress and I wasted a whole day building. I had originally planned to build the Delorean which the boys said not too as I had added the A-Team van in and they thought I should do something different. So I decided to try and create the scene when Marty gets to Hill valley after going back in time (You know the part "Mr Sandman......"). The section wasn't high enough to add the clock tower in though and it didn't seem right without it, so after a few hours building I broke the section up and attempted the enchantment under the sea dance. That didn't work either and by this point I was feeling pretty frustrated. Then, Opeie said 'You should build the big speaker from the start of the movie with Marty playing his guitar!"... the kids a genius! Within an hour it was looking amazing.

I knew that the final quarter of the larger section was going to be for the Gremlins but I had no Idea how I was going to create the idea I had so I made some make shift walls so that I could put the next level in and start working on the top layer. With all of the previous Death Star builds the top level had been split up into 4 sections but I had an idea and wanted to do something a little different. Before I started the build I knew that I wanted to build the closing scene from Ghostbusters with the Staypuft. It seemed like the perfect idea for high up on top. I was concerned though that the size of the Staypuft minifigure would look silly compared to the giant one in the movie but once I'd added the terror dog statues and the Ghostbusters it all looked pretty cute. 

I was talking to a friend of mine on one of the LEGO FB pages about the build and I told her that I was struggling for an idea for the Beetlejuice section. She said that I should make the graveyard scene, I couldn't remember it so that night I watched the movie again. She was right, it was the perfect idea and when the advert comes on with a country looking Beetlejuice riding a cow I knew I needed to include that too, along with his coffin and sign pointing to his grave. The double section was too big to be all graveyard so I added a sandy area and put the sandworm in their too. All I needed now was to come up with something for that Gremlins section. 

I knew what I wanted to do but I just wasn't sure how I was going to make it look how I wanted it too. The kitchen scene was one of my favourites when I was younger, I mean whats not fun about seeing a woman Microwave and blend up a Gremlin? Building a kitchen was the easy part but I needed chopped up gremlins in pools of gremlin slime. It wasn't until I had built Billy's knife wielding mom that it started to come together. I somehow had to add Gizmo in there too so I had him casually cruising in his remote control car.

It's so satisfying to complete a build like this, but this one was even better as it was a gift for Steve, a top bloke that deserves to have good things happen in his life. Lets hope that good things come in 3's and this has just kick-started it. Either way hes got a new toy to play with, I know that always makes me smile.

"Whatever good things we build end up building us."

I loved growing up in the 80's/90's. Childrens TV and Movies these days don't seem to have the magic that they had back when I was young and impressionable. I would get lost in Saturday morning TV, and films like The Goonies and Back to the future must have seemed to my parents like they were being played on a loop. One thing I would have loved from these days back then though are the LEGO movies. The movies are a constant flow of building inspiration and some of our custom builds have come from watching these amazing movies.

The LEGO movie opened up all sorts of building fun for us, with its series of fun mini figures and its creative kits to coincide. As soon as it came out on DVD it was nearly always on in the background while we sat building together. The LEGO Batman Movie came out and instantly became the top building inspiration movie (in fact we watched it this evening as we built). The Batman Deathstar came off of the back of this and ended up being such a great build. 

And now we are weeks away from the release of the LEGO Ninjago movie, With some interesting kits and an amazing Minifigure series to get us all inspired again. With the release of all these fun movies, this is such an exciting time for LEGO and I'm excited about what we could possibly end up building together after the boys have seen the movie.

While we wait for the upcoming release though we have been feeling up bags collecting the Minifigure series and building a couple of the kits. There's nothing quite like a great selection of products to get you revved up for a movie release and the Manta Ray Bomber (70609) and Master Falls (70608) have done just that as the boys are desperate to know how they fit in to the movie.

With a huge selection of new parts from both the series and the minifigure range, LEGO have again added to our ever growing brick empire at home and we couldn't be happier about it.

The boys have got their eye on the LEGO City 70620 kit, which as awesome looking as it is, is sadly another of those LEGO kits which is a little out of our price range. Thanks to the online instructions though I think we may build our our own but in a completely different style... watch this space.

The LEGO Ninjago Movie hits the cinemas on October 13th

"Get a bunch of bad guys together to fight bad guys? That's a terrible idea!"

I've been pretty quiet on here for the last few weeks but there has been a good reason for it. When we asked Opeie what he would like for his birthday, we were obviously expecting some sort of LEGO, he's a HUGE brick enthusiast just like his dad. What I wasn't expecting though was for him to ask for something that you can't buy as a kit. When it comes to Opeie's LEGO roleplaying, the most played with LEGO piece is the Disney themed Deathstar that we built last year. The shape of the original kit has the best playability for children and with all those rooms to play in with your minifigures, it is amazing for making upLEGO stories. The Disney themed one came about after creating our Christmas themed Deathstar the year before. The boys loved it but it ended up becoming part of our LEGO arcade machine. We encased it in the lower part of the machine for display meaning that the boys couldn't play with it anymore (as you can imagine they were not impressed).  

The Disney Deathstar made up for that though, that was until the release of The LEGO Batman movie. Opeie has become a huge DC fan since watching the movie, so when it got to his birthday build up, you can probably guess what he asked for, a Batman-themed version of his favourite play set, the Deathstar. We talked about it and I said maybe it could be something we could build together at a later date because there was so little time before his big day (yes I'm a meanie!). After that it was all systems go, I had 3 weeks to build it but it took almost a week for some obscure shaped baseplates to be delivered that I needed to build the levels. I spent the first week hitting all the online trade sites as I had a list as long as my arm of characters needed to fill the creation and I wanted to keep costs to a minimum. Bless Opeie, as part of his request there were only 2 characters he asked for that he really wanted, but I was sure I could do better than that though.

 As soon as my Bricklink order arrived I began building, For the first few days I went through my usual self-doubt 'this is going to turn out crap' 'I haven't got enough time' blah blah blah. As always though when I am building, the more bricks I attach the more motivated I get and my race to complete this special gift for that awesome boy of mine became a very fun challenge. Each night he would go to bed and as Mrs M was tucking him in, I was sneaking my creation downstairs to continue building. There were packages coming pretty much every day from figures I was trading and it was shaping up to be a creation full of DC Comics finest.

In keeping with the randomness of the movie and the awesome kits released to coincide with the movie, I didn't want to be too obvious with the themes of the rooms. We had already created custom jokers fun houses on different occasions and Mr Freeze and Catwoman have had their own builds on various things. The only character I repeated was Poison ivy but that was only because I had stolen the monster plant from Opeie's Scooby Doo kit for the arcade and hadn't replaced it. He wouldn't let me forget it so I saw it as the perfect chance to build him a new one.

Instead of The Joker getting his own multicoloured craziness of a room I decided to base their room around Harley Quinns nurse outfit from the LEGO Batman series figures. Joker donned some scrubs and poor Batman lay in bed completely oblivious about the medical care he was about to receive.

The two characters that Opeie really wanted were Beast boy and Star Fire. He has become quite the Teen titans Go! fan since his new found DC obsession, so seeing as we already had Cyborg and Robin it made sense to track down the others and create a Teen Titans Go! room. All I needed to fill it was a pink couch from the episodes and the characters, job done.

  
With the latest wave of Mighty Micro's hitting the shelves, we were very lucky to have had them sent to us to review, so we had a great collection of them to use in the build. as they are shorter than the usual characters and have cute child-like facial expressions Opeie had joked about how it would be cool if they were all in a class room. I had seen this done already but I wanted to include it in the build and using Eraser and Calculator as the teachers was a nice touch I think (I still want to get hold of Calander man too though).

Lobster Lovin' batman and Vacation Batman were two of my favourite characters from the Movie series figures and I wanted to do something fun with them both. I had built a bat shaped pool when the series was released and I was hoping to use that, but it was far too big for the Deathstar, so I used half of it in one of the larger rooms for Vacation batman, Aquaman, Orca and Black Manta and then for the remainder of the room built a sauna for Lobster Lovin' Batman.

As the Minifigure packages were coming through the post each day, I was building up quite a collection of Batman variations in different outfits and figured that the only way to display them was to create a walk in wardrobe style room for the Dark Knight himself. I loved this room because the brighter costumes really added some fun to what had been a build heavy on the black and grey.

 I had also managed to get hold of a lot more villains than I was expecting and obviously not all of them were going to get their own themed room. I needed somewhere to put them so I decided to add in Gotham police station. Barbara and Commissioner Gordon got there own room and after mooching for all the handcuffs I could find I had a great place to display some of the bad guys that just couldn't help but get captured by Batman and Gotham PD.

One thing I was really thankful of while building this was that we had won a Mosiac from the Opening of the Leicester square store which was so awesome. After Opeie had built the custom portrait of his face there were loads of single studs left, which ended up being perfect for making patterned flooring in many of the rooms.

By this point, I was really running out of time and I had so many other things that I needed to be doing in preparation for Opeie's big day. Then Mrs M pointed out something that stupidly hadn't even crossed my mind. I get so carried away when I am building something that all I can see is the end piece, she pointed out though that although it was turning out great and clearly he was going to love it, wouldn't it be nice if some of it was left for us to build together, and she was so right. Whenever Mrs M asks if there is anything I would like for Fathers day or my Birthday, I always say 'something fun I can do with the boys' and I almost missed out on the magic of building LEGO with the boys here. So I left the lower section of the Batcave for Opeie to build a Batcave area for batman and Robin and the top floor empty, no walls or flooring etc. I simply wrote 'Happy Birthday Opeie' in bricks and displayed the remainder of the figures that I managed to collect over the weeks.

As expected the Batman themed Deathstar went down a treat and having that area on top to sit and build together really was an amazing idea of Mrs M's. Opeie has big ideas and we've just started building a pizza parlour for his new Scarecrow figure from the movie set. He's also been busy making sports related Batman costumes for his costume room.

It's going to be a fun few weeks of custom building with the boys and I'm looking forward to getting stuck in with them. I can't wait to see what craziness the boys come up with. LEGO will continue to be one of my favourite things to do with the boys, there really is so much father/son magic in those amazing bricks.

Want to see more? check out the video HERE!