Existing pieces and building techniques ultimately determined why 76304 Batman Forever Batmobile’s scale didn’t match those of previous LEGO DC sets.
LEGO DC fans of a certain age may have already marked August 1 on their calendars, the date that 76304 Batman Forever Batmobile will finally blast into view. The 909-piece set is the first-ever version of the Dark Knight’s ride from the 1995 blockbuster movie, with the vehicle surprisingly never having appeared in brick-built form before and launching just in time for the film’s 30th anniversary in 2025.
It’s been a long road for 76304 Batman Forever Batmobile becoming a reality and the model’s development wasn’t without a few challenges along the way. One of those was determining the scale of the unique vehicle, with its final proportions ultimately coming down to a specific section of the car.
In a recent roundtable interview with fan media, the set’s designer, Mark Stafford, discussed the origins of 76304 Batman Forever Batmobile, revealing to Brick Fanatics some of the hurdles the LEGO DC model had to overcome and how the vehicle’s final size was steered by specific building techniques and existing elements.
“The scale was kind of dictated by the wheels and the arches over the wheels,” explained Mark. “We didn't have elements that were bigger than this that we could make the wheel arches with, so going to a larger scale wouldn't really have worked.”
Figuring out the overall scale for
“This is the very first sketch model that was made for this car and it was built by Ed Lawrence,” said Mark, referring to the freelance LEGO designer. “The scale was set by these arches, these wheels. It's been updated a little bit. I put the new logo on it, but that was the first version.
It is a weird thing sometimes, when you're building with LEGO, that the bricks dictate the scale – that there are certain elements that mean that this model is going to end up being at this size, because it's the only way to make, you know, a circle of a particular size, which was the problem with the wheels and the wheel arches here.”
One option could have been to produce a much larger version of
“Whenever I looked at going bigger with this, that was an issue,” Mark elaborated. “How do I get a smooth curve over the wheel that still looks close enough to the actual vehicle? And coming down in scale, then the ‘ribs’ are already a little wide of being a brick wide. If you come down in scale, they just disappear and the only way to represent them would probably be a sticker on the sides.
We just don't have anything that allows us to make that wheel arch any larger right now. The quarter circles are the 4x4 ones, allowing us to make a six-wide gap that's as big as we have, but we would need to go bigger to make those patches smoother. So again, it's an odd sort of new scale of Batmobile, but it's very much dictated by what's possible with the bricks.”
Support the work that Brick Fanatics does by purchasing your LEGO using our affiliate links. Thanks!
Comments
Be the first to comment!