Why Can't Lego Click?

But Lego in the late 1990s was totally self-sufficient. It produced no licensed toys -- and never had. When Eio, worried about missing out on licensing, started to cast about for a partner, what was he looking for? "A company that reflected the same corporate and educational values we had," he says. The natural choice: Lucasfilm, keeper of the Star Wars products. Executives at Lucas, it turned out, had wanted to partner with Lego for a long time, according to Howard Roffman, president of Lucas Licensing Ltd. So when Eio and a small team approached Roffman, they found an eager audience.

Executives in Billund couldn't have been more horrified. Says Eio: "The initial reaction was, 'You guys are crazy.' " It wasn't the Lego way. "We had been such a purist company," Eio says. "We tended to want to do everything within ourselves." Even the computerized Lego pieces are produced at Lego factories.

The debate over whether to do Star Wars products took place among Lego's dozen most-senior executives over the course of six months. One board member at the time said to Eio, "Over my dead body will you be launching Star Wars in Europe."

In the end, says Eio, the only reason the Lego Star Wars products were produced was that the owner, Kjeld, decided they would be. The Star Wars products were "a blockbuster, worldwide," says Eio. "It was the biggest product launch in history." The lesson went beyond the value of licensing. What kids were buying was something that Lego had never offered: a story. Says Eio: "It led us to say, Storytelling is important."

Star Wars has paved the way for a product that in some ways is the least Lego-like ever -- something that even Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen says has a "different" look. "Parents may not identify it immediately as Lego," he says. "But kids will."

The new product line is a world of action figures known as Bionicle. The line includes six hulking heroes, six dwarflike wise ones, and five technovillains. They inhabit a tropical island called Mata Nui. Each category of Bionicle has a name (Toa, Turaga, Rahi), each individual creature has a name (Pohatu, Kopaka, Onua), and the geography of Mata Nui is carefully imagined -- right down to the creation of a new system of measurements exclusive to the world of Bionicle. The creatures look like the kinds of robots that an 11-year-old boy would draw on his math notebook during a tedious lesson in fractions.

The Bionicle series of toys -- introduced this spring in Europe, this summer in the United States -- is radical in any number of ways for Lego. But the most important departure is that none of the figures have a "play meaning" independent of their story: the legend of Mata Nui. You can buy one and build it -- but when you're done, unless you know the story, you won't have a clue as to what you've got.

Lego invented the Bionicle creatures, and a Lego product-development team wrote the legend of Mata Nui. Lego even invented the word "bionicle" -- a combination of biological and chronicle. Here then is a Lego product (the intricate creatures need to be assembled; the most elaborate have hundreds of pieces) that is in some ways the opposite of the basic brick. On its own, it has no appeal. Only the story invests Bionicle with fun -- and Lego made up the story as well as the creatures. What Lego does not provide is a resolution in the battle between the liberating Toa heroes and the deadly Makuta villains.

Lego is hoping that Bionicle will be a hit on the scale of Star Wars. The Toa, the heroic Bionicle toys, wear masks -- kids can collect 72 different "masks of power and knowledge." Each mask has a name as well. Can you say, "Pokémon"?

The toymakers in the village know as well as anyone that childhood is often a reflection of the grown-up world around it. Sad as it made some of the toymakers to think about, their toys had not kept up with kids. The plastic Lego pieces were beautiful and fun. But what if Ole Kirk had shrugged and said, "Sure, you are right. We are a wooden-toy company. Forget plastic"?

Admitting that childhood has changed -- and perhaps that the toys haven't changed enough to keep up -- isn't an answer to the problems, of course. It is simply the question itself. Chief toymaker Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen has many experts, designers, and advisers to help him make sense of the new world of children, to make sense of the modern child, to find ways to recapture the magic. What ultimately rescues the chief toymaker, though, is a visit from the ghost of his grandfather, Ole Kirk. "Childhood has changed," Ole Kirk says. "Children have not."