Vig01: Joe Vig goes to Persia

Finished roughly one month too late for the first Joe Vig contest on August the 23rd 2005.

Vig01-1.jpg (28830 byte)Originally I had a skeleton on the top corridor, but it had apparently taken a stroll when I had time to take the pictures. I thought walking skeletons first appeared in Prince 2...

Vigs: Sometime in 2005, or perhaps earlier, I became aware of the special lego phenomenon: vignettes or vigs, by browsing Brickshelf.
I thought it was a great idea, sort of the haiku or tanka version of lego scene making since the maximum size is 8x8 studs (at least for the base) fits both my patience and lego collection.

Vig01-2.jpg (28480 byte)*Bzeet... bzeet... bze-SPLAT*

Joe Vig: However like poetry, you have to be inspired, and you need a story you wish to tell.
It took something special to get me started, and that special thing was the Joe Vig concept.

Joe Vig is the unluckiest minifig in the world, and the idea is to make scenes where he's just about to get into big trouble.
Often the fatal kind that gives me a nice sort of cruel morbid satisfaction.

Vig01-3.jpg (27971 byte)Yes, it has a backside too

Prince of Persia: So for a while I plotted on ways to kill Joe, trying to come up with some spectacular new way: I wondered what kind of death I would find most nasty.
Natural candidates were the kind you find in computer games, and after a while I remembered the "trauma" of my childhood: The clipping traps from the old Prince of Persia game.

This was a kind of trap you had to run or jump through - at the right moment to avoid being clipped in halves with a nasty sound and start the level all over again.
The reason they were particularly nasty was that it always looked as though you would be clipped, even when your timing was right, and from time to time it wasn't so you were never really sure - just hearing the sound of them in the distance... brrr!
At late hours of playing I could sometimes even get so paranoid that I could freeze momentarily with a sting of panic in front of them!

Actually I almost feel sorry to expose Joe to this cruel death, but I just thought it would be the perfect Joe vig:
A scene that a lot of people would recognize, and something that many would realize that the horrible timing Joe is jumping with here is certain death:
To survive you needed to jump when the teeth closed, because then they would be opening instead of closing when you reached them.

Colours: Btw, I know that some of you guys would argue that the stones ought to be dark blue, but since I always played the game in black and white, they were grey to me, and blue just seems to be a silly colour for stones... Anyways, even if I wanted, I wouldn't have had the dark blue pieces for it.

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