The Birth of the Disco Spaceman

fRealizing I have never really photographed the iconic LEGO spaceman of the classic Space theme I thought I’d give it a try. It could be fun, I thought.  You know, taking almost forty years old plastic and shoot it with modern gear, old meets new and all that. There’s a twist in it that I like.

The only classic spaceman I had was really rugged, not necessarily a bad thing, but this was the one and only release of the red spaceman with a sticker logo. The worn out sticker really looks less than desirable in a photograph. So, it was off to the interwebs to see the price range on some vintage plastics.

Some of the stuff available turned out to be ludicrously expensive, some just plain expensive. Then there were some that I could actually afford – I bought a few to try this thing out. But while searching for a deal on the spacemen I saw something delightfully silly; there was a spaceman that was not in one of the basic colours, it was gold plated!

The golden spaceman is, of course, not an official LEGO item, it’s another custom job in a long line of custom jobs. This one is gold plated all over except for the backpack which is chromed silver. There is a printed space logo on the torso to finish the look. It’s amazing what they can do these days! Except jacking up the price on these over 20 fold after I bought mine. Well, come to think of it, that is kinda amazing! But I did not pay over $1000 for this, just to be clear.

The thing is that having something gold plated or chromed is a cheesy and tacky way to decorate anything, I am generally not attracted to that at all, but this one kinda clicked. I mean, a golden spaceman is perfectly plausible, the real life astronauts used silver spacesuits during the Mercury program and the lunar landers of the Apollo program were mostly covered with golden mylar sheet. The aestethics match amazingly well.

I wanted to give the golden guy a go before all the other spacemen.

I did not go for the real life space program look with my spaceman, however. It wouldn’t have been fun enough. Instead, with all the gold glitter I had, and probably what they had in the 1970’s when the LEGO minifigure was first introduced, the Disco Spaceman was born.

If there was a soundtrack to this photograph, it would be something David Bowie would have written if he had drifted into disco music.

It’s good to be back.

Avanaut

Full time illustrator, part time photographer. As such, I created blizzards with Star Wars Lego and had an influence on how The Lego Movie looks like.