LEGO 70840 Welcome to Apocalypseburg!: 8 hidden details

LEGO 70840 Welcome to Apocalypseburg! was the flagship set of The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part. It was revealed on 4 January 2019, reached LEGO VIP members on 16 January and went on general sale on 1 February 2019. The finished model stands 52 cm high, 49 cm wide and 33 cm deep, and it is built from over 3,100 pieces: 3,107 according to BrickLink’s inventory, 3,178 according to the box. The set was designed by Justin Ramsden, with graphics by Paul Constantin Turcanu.

At first glance it is a wasteland town piled around a fallen Statue of Liberty. Look closer and almost every corner carries a joke, a film reference or a clever building trick. Here are eight details worth a second look.

A statue that holds up a whole town

After the events of the first film, Bricksburg has become Apocalypseburg, and LEGO built that wasteland around one of cinema’s best-known ruins. A half-buried Statue of Liberty is a classic post-apocalyptic image that goes back to Planet of the Apes in 1968. Justin Ramsden said the statue felt like a natural fit, partly because LEGO had already made Statue of Liberty models before.

Here, though, she is not a monument but a foundation. Rooms, ladders and walkways climb her raised arm and her head, and even her tablet has a new job: it now serves as a ramp from the lower streets to the upper levels. Around her are a café, a gym, a jail and lookout posts, all standing on two large base sections with Technic cores that clip together along angled edges. There is no baseplate, just an irregular patch of wasteland.

A movie poster hidden inside her head

Lift the top of the crown and you find Lucy’s hideout, the highest room in the build. On its wall hangs a poster that parodies Planet of the Apes, the film that made the ruined statue famous. Its star is the “Where Are My Pants?” Guy from the first LEGO Movie.

The designers confirmed the joke themselves in their Brickset interview. It is a film reference tucked inside another film reference, placed where only the builder will ever see it.

Her eyebrows are hot dog sausages

Look closely at Lady Liberty’s face. Her eyebrows are LEGO hot dog sausages, produced in sand green for the first time for this set. It is the kind of parts use that LEGO fans love: a piece from the kitchen, turned into a facial feature.

The statue needed so much sand green that 70840 brought a whole wave of new parts in that colour, including large 1x6x5 panels and 55° slopes. For parts collectors, it became one of the key sand green sets of its time.

A tilt worked out with Pythagoras

The leaning statue does not rest on a random stack of bricks. Under the sand green skin is a frame of Technic beams and liftarms. To hold the head and the torch arm at a steep angle without any illegal connections, the designers used right-angled triangles, sized with Pythagoras’ theorem.

The result is strong but delicate in one place. The 452-page instruction book, with 756 steps and interviews with the designers and directors, includes advice on moving the finished model, and one clear rule: never pick it up by the statue’s raised arm.

Nods to the Batmobile and NINJAGO City

Justin Ramsden also designed 70905 The Batmobile for The LEGO Batman Movie, and for Apocalypseburg he salvaged a piece of it. The car’s radiator grille is built into the town as a makeshift air-conditioning unit, and the number plate is printed rusty orange instead of bright yellow, as if it had sat in the desert for years. Nearby are crates of “Bat merch”.

Another LEGO film flagship shaped the set too. Asked about its size, Ramsden pointed to 70620 NINJAGO City as an excellent benchmark for scale. The nod made it into the build: in the old subway car that is now Batman’s gym, an advert invites everyone to “Visit Ninjago City”.

Barbed wire, back after nine years

The animated LEGO films are free to use any element, including retired ones. When the film’s wasteland featured an old barbed wire coil, the set had to bring it back. The metallic coil had not been produced since 2010, and the set contains just two of them.

One sits on the improvised basketball hoop in front of the armoury, right next to the “Bat merch” crates. A small detail, but exactly the kind that parts collectors notice.

Pull the pipe and the chair flies

Bad Cop’s famous chair kick from the first film lives on. In the Super Secret Police jail, now run by Scribble Cop, a pipe outside the building is really a lever. Technic parts hidden in the base connect it to the chair inside the cell, so moving the pipe sends the chair flying across the room.

It is the main play function in a set that is otherwise built for display, and a direct nod to Good Cop and Bad Cop.

13 figures, though LEGO said 12

LEGO advertised twelve minifigures: Emmet, Lucy, Apocalypseburg Batman, Harley Quinn, Green Lantern, Scribble Cop, Larry the Barista, Chainsaw Dave, the “Where Are My Pants?” Guy, Mo-Hawk, Roxxi and Fuse. BrickLink and Brickset count thirteen, because the skeleton mannequin in the armoury is a complete figure too.

Eleven of those thirteen figures were never released in any other set. Only Emmet and Lucy appear elsewhere, which is why a complete copy matters so much to collectors.

Apocalypseburg had a short life on the shelves. LEGO marked the launch with designer signings in its stores in Paris, London and Orlando, and less than a year later, by the end of 2019, the set had already been retired. Today it can only be found on the secondary market.

Brickollector has a sealed copy of LEGO 70840 Welcome to Apocalypseburg! available now, ready for a collection of LEGO movie sets.