Legoland Looks Like a Chip Off the Plastic Block

It was in the quaint Old World Danish port town of Korsor that I began to wonder if perhaps my wife Susan and I had made a mistake.

As a concession, of sorts, to our 7-year-old son Adam, who would be required to endure many grown-up activities during our two-week visit to Scandinavia, we had promised to make a side trip to Legoland.

The problem in Korsor was that we had committed a cardinal sin of summertime travel in Scandinavia. We had not made a reservation for us and our car on the ferry. So we were waiting in a seemingly interminable line with hundreds of other vehicles under a relentlessly hot late-afternoon Danish sun.

A five-hour side trip was turning into a nine-hour nightmare, and I was turning into an ugly, impatient American.

If we don’t make the next hourly ferry to Nyborg, I announced after we had watched three leave without us, we’re turning around and going back to Copenhagen. As it turned out, we made it onto the next ferry.

It took us across a beautiful body of water known as “Store Baelt” (Big Belt), and three hours later we had reached our ultimate destination: Billund, Denmark.

To an adult, Billund is a tiny speck on the map 150 miles west of Copenhagen and 170 miles north of Hamburg, West Germany. It is a pristine town off the beaten path in the peaceful, gently rolling farmland of the Jutland peninsula, the westernmost region of Denmark.

To a 7-year-old child who has played with Legos virtually since the day as an infant that he learned to grasp small objects, Billund is mecca. It is home to Legoland, a theme park that is made mostly of Lego bricks--about 35 million of them. It also is home to the world headquarters of Lego System A-S.

Legos, for those not in the parenting or grandparenting business, are small, brightly colored, plastic, snap-together building toys that are marketed in more than 110 countries around the world.

In Denmark, where the Lego company was founded in 1932 and the plastic brick as it exists today was patented in 1958, they are a national obsession of sorts.

Sets of them, available for public use free of charge, are everywhere: in banks, in hotels, in restaurants, on ferries, in airports.

There is at least one Lego-emblazoned postage stamp in Denmark. And, according to the company, Lego products are found in 90% of Danish households with children under age 15.

In Billund--a town with a regional population of about 7,000 people, 1,250 of whom are Lego employees--that percentage undoubtedly is higher.

The first thing I noticed upon arriving here was the army of bright yellow vehicles--each adorned with several red Lego logos--buzzing about on business.

Full-sized trucks, pickup trucks, vans, step-vans, mini-vans, cars, scooters, golf carts and even forklifts: They were everywhere, only they were much bigger than the ones I’m used to tripping over on the living room floor.

Another thing I noticed was Adam’s excited demeanor. The evening before we were to visit the park he was filled with a level of anticipation usually reserved only for Christmas Eve. He was smiling from ear to ear. He ate all of his dinner, even the vegetables. And he went to bed without any resistance.

The next morning he rushed through breakfast and tugged at Sue and me impatiently as we attempted to leisurely enjoy havarti cheese, Danish ham and several delicious forms of herring with our rolls and coffee. Fifteen minutes later, as we passed through the Legoland gates, Adam was in heaven and Sue and I were pleasantly surprised.

To be sure, the park, which first opened in 1968, is to Lego System A-S what Disneyland and Disney World are to Walt Disney Productions: a publicity lightning rod and a commercial flagship. However, Legoland is more reasonably priced and infinitely cozier than the Disney complexes.

One full day is plenty of time to see the whole park, we found, and a family of four could do it for between $75 and $100, including a Danish lunch or dinner.

“We try to be a family park, giving pleasure and fun to children,” said Knud Hedegard, the park’s managing director. “Our intention, our experience, is that people will spend four to five hours in Legoland.”

Legoland is part amusement park, with rides, restaurants and other attractions, and part architect’s dream, with charmingly detailed and amazingly automated miniature exhibits depicting scenes from around the world.

It is the miniature scenes--generally built at 1:20 scale and composed mostly of Lego bricks--that distinguish it from other theme parks.

To us, perhaps the most impressive of these scenes were two separate replicas, one of the port of Copenhagen and the other of the canals of Amsterdam.

In addition to architecturally correct row houses, warehouses, shipyards, model trains, drawbridges and landscaping, these exhibits include working ferries and cargo ships loading, unloading and traversing real water, all automated by electronic computerized remote control. We could only marvel at the precision and detail.

Among the other impressive exhibits unique to the park were:

--An automated Scandinavian airport, complete with planes taxiing down the runways--based on those in Copenhagen, Stockholm and Goteborg, Sweden.

--Miniature rural scenes from Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Norway’s fiords and West Germany’s Rhine River Valley.

--Replicas of slices of Americana: the U.S. Capitol, the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore and a monument to Native American chief Sitting Bull.

In a place where three languages--Danish, German and English--were spoken interchangeably, these exhibits made an American boy feel a bit more at home.

--A safari exhibit that includes beautiful, close-to-life-size models of elephants, giraffes, zebras, monkeys, lions, crocodiles and other animals.

--Titania’s Palace, a dollhouse-like miniature palace that was the passion of British officer Sir Neville Wilkinson before his death in 1948.

This exhibit, which was purchased and refurbished by Legoland in the late ‘70s and is really a self-contained museum, features some 3,000 handmade items, but not a single Lego brick, so we didn’t spend much time there.

And, of course, there are rides. Not abrupt roller coasters, but in the main gentle rides that seem to fit into the nurturing Lego philosophy: a mini-boat ride that cruises past replicas of an Egyptian temple and the Acropolis; a very tame helicopter ride; a train ride through the park; a ride to the top of an observation tower overlooking the park and Billund, and mini-cars that are more like real cars than bumper cars and encourage responsibility, not recklessness, behind the wheel. A good young driver can even earn a Legoland driver’s license.

“For Legoland park, the main idea is to be a flagship for the Lego idea,” Hedegard said. “And you will find that we Lego people are a bit religious. We believe in the Lego idea.”

It is an idea that originated in the early 1930s with the company’s founder, a Danish master carpenter, Ole Kirk Christiansen. Christiansen, whose first line of toys built in Billund were wooden, not plastic, deeply appreciated the power of play.

“The world of the child is as infinite as his imagination,” he is said to have said. “Give free reins to his creativity, and he shall build a world richer and more imaginative than any adult can conceive.”

His motto was “play well” or, in Danish, leg godt , from which the Lego corporate name was derived.

Legoland has been playing well in Northern Europe for years.

It boasts an average of about 900,000 visitors annually, most of them from Denmark, West Germany, Sweden, Norway and the United Kingdom. Fewer than 1% are from the United States, but if you’re in the area, it’s worth a side trip.