Two Scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Recreated in Lego

Stan­ley Kubrick, among the many oth­er skills that made him per­haps the best-known auteur of the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, could craft an imme­di­ate­ly mem­o­rable scene. More­over, he could con­struct entire films out of noth­ing but imme­di­ate­ly mem­o­rable scenes. This goes espe­cial­ly for his Cold War black com­e­dy Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love the Bomb, whose fans tend to quote to each oth­er not indi­vid­ual lines but entire five‑, ten‑, fif­teen-minute stretch­es from the movie. One such oft-reen­act­ed scene, the phone con­ver­sa­tion in which Pres­i­dent Merkin Muf­fley warns ine­bri­at­ed Pre­mier Dim­itri Kisov of the U.S. bombers head­ed toward Rus­sia appears at the top of the post, in the orig­i­nal black-and-white, with the orig­i­nal voic­es of Peter Sell­ers, Peter Bull, and George C. Scott, and — with noth­ing in front of the cam­era but Lego bricks and Lego men.

Just above, you can see Sell­ers’ per­for­mance as the tit­u­lar eccen­tric, alien hand-syn­drome-suf­fer­ing doc­tor phys­i­cal­ly ren­dered in Lego. Dr. Strangelove fans know the scene comes late in the film, when a long series of errors and acts of unrea­son on all sides has made immi­nent the moment of mutu­al­ly assured destruc­tion. “I had to take out the famous scene of Slim Pick­ens rid­ing the bomb and the nuclear holo­caust cred­its to have this video view­able, because those scenes were tak­en direct­ly from the movie,” explains these videos’ cre­ator, a Youtube user by the name of XXxO­PRIMExXX. “I was hop­ing to have the Slim Pick­ens scene done in Lego by now but I just nev­er had enough time or effort to do it, maybe some time in the future.” Let me say that, if I have con­fi­dence in any­one to get that job done, I have con­fi­dence in some­one with the sta­mi­na to suc­cess­ful­ly build a Lego War Room.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inside Dr. Strangelove: Doc­u­men­tary Reveals How a Cold War Sto­ry Became a Kubrick Clas­sic

Aban­doned Alter­nate Titles for Two Great Films: Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go

Clas­sic Pho­tographs Remade Lego Style

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.