Lego: The Beatles Yellow Submarine

Over the last decade or so Lego has experienced an impressive upswing of popularity in modern culture. Those small multicoloured building blocks have spawned theme parks, cartoons, computer games and a surprisingly existential movie, released in 2014. Thanks mainly to some canny licensing deals — such as Star Wars, Marvel and DC Comics, to name a few — the Lego brand is now one of the most recognisable in the world. So when the company announced a few months ago that it was going to release a set featuring The Beatles Yellow Submarine, the reaction of fans wasn’t so much why, as when?

The Blues Brothers (1980)

“It wasn’t a lie… it was just bullshit”.

Weaving a story utilising Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi’s existing stage band (the band in the film were members of the ‘real-life’ band) and under John Landis’ brash direction, The Blues Brothers is over-the-top exuberant fun. Everything is done to excess – the comedy is broad (“Sell me your children!’), the music infectious (church parishioners jump twenty feet into the air) and the car chases extreme (why have a car chase with two police cars when you can use 200?).