The designer behind the new LEGO Black Pearl says Disney was initially ‘a little bit hesitant’ about the idea of releasing a pirate ship specifically for adults.
While the LEGO Group often says its licensed sets are originated ‘in collaboration’ with its IP partners,
“When we approached them and said, ‘Hey, we want to make this thing,’ they were a little bit hesitant,” Mike says. “They were like, ‘That sounds like a toy for children. What do you mean? You want to make this big Pirates of the Caribbean pirate ship for adults?’ And then we showed them the first photos of the concept, and they were like, ‘Okay, now we understand. We get what you’re trying to do.’”
The previous version of this ship debuted in 2011, and with only 804 pieces in the box was very much a playset for kids rather than a display set for adults (no surprise given the notion of ‘adults welcome’ was still nine years away). But this actually isn’t the first Pirates of the Caribbean set geared towards an older audience: 2017’s 71042 Silent Mary includes 2,294 pieces and has a 14+ label on the box.
If that set released today, it’d likely be 18+, but back then it wasn’t explicitly for adults like
“In our design team, we have a pretty strong history of making some pretty cool products with partners, so they put a lot of trust in us to just say we knew what we were doing,” Mike says, before adding that Disney wasn’t completely hands-off, either, providing the LEGO designers with almost all the reference material they could ask for. Almost.
“The one thing I didn't get, which I really wanted, was in Dead Men Tell No Tales,” he explains. “There’s a scene where the ship is in a bottle, and then they smash the bottle. The camera cuts, and it's like it’s growing, but then it pans back, and you realise it's only grown to a model size. I was like, ‘I need that prop. I know that exists. You cannot fool me. Somewhere out there, there's a perfectly-scaled replica that somebody made for that movie, and I want to see it.’”
While that prop would have no doubt been pretty handy for figuring out the Black Pearl’s proportions on a smaller scale, Disney’s archaeological efforts to dig it up were unfortunately unfounded. Instead, Mike had to work from a bunch of other scale models, including one that he says might have been half the size of the real thing.
“They had three or four different scale models that they built for shooting, and they had a super big version of the ship,” he recalls. “It didn’t have any of the masts, but I think it was at 1:2 or 1:3 scale, a giant replica that they had tonnes and tonnes of photos of, and then lots of production stills from the production of Curse of the Black Pearl that show all of the ships that they built for that.
“It was so cool to get to see all that stuff, because you find a lot of drawings online of this ship, but it's really hard to tell what is really accurate source material, and what is something that somebody just made up.”
You can see how well Mike and the team recreated the Black Pearl (or Captain Jack Sparrow’s Pirate Ship, a name given for reasons vague and mysterious) in our in-depth review of the 2,862-piece set.
Read more...
- Comparing LEGO Captain Jack Sparrow’s Pirate Ship to 2011’s Black Pearl
- LEGO Black Pearl designer explains first-of-its-kind waterline effect
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