Lego men, that is.
I’ve been inspired to try my hand at stop-motion animation, but for it i’m going to need three black lego men. I don’t have any, the online catalogue doesn’t have any, and I can’t find any of eBay. I’m sure i’ve seen them, though.
Anyone have any ideas on how I could procure them?
Mug some 7 year old boys?
Take a page from Vaudeville and take yellow Lego men and put some black face on them.
Seriously now, people. www.Bricklink.com. It’s a site for finding online sellers of lego sets and parts.
Depending on how you want to go, you’re could buy one of those figure sets with the little replicas of actual basketball players. Cconveniently, they come in 3-packs. (There’s actually a slim chance that you could find these sets on www.lego.com as well.) These little people will of course have strangely detailed faces, wonky hands for holding a basketball, and spring-loaded legs (I think you can swap those out, though).
If you’re pickier than that, the recent Star Wars Slave 1 lego set came with a black person with the standard lego face pattern and normal lego hands (the Bespin guard, specifically). It may cost a few bucks more, but you should be able to find loose figures or individual figure parts on the aforementioned Bricklink.
Good luck!
There used to be a Lego Lando Calrissian. I’d be more than ready to believe that a search on “lego lando calrissian” would give you a number of leads.
(I would guess his gold cape was removable.)
Go with bricklink.com , as begbert2 suggested. It pretty much has any available part, and you can get lego faces for a couple of cents apiece. Brown lego hands are a bit more rare, since they’ve only appeared in the star wars sets.
Additional info for the nitpicky:
For traditional sets, Lego people have always had yellow faces. However, for movie licenses and sports licenses (when depicting real people) skincolored parts are used.
Lego sports had a basketball subtheme a while back, where the basketball minifigures had spring-loaded legs and specially shaped arms, so the little lego people could actually throw basketballs. The arms and hands are one piece here.The star wars sets have had two black folks, included in larger (more expensive) sets. As the basketball sets were cheaper and more plentiful, that stuff is easier to come by.
That was one of the things I thought of - I knew i’d seen black lego men before, and then I thought of Lando. I’ve done a few searches but it looks like the only ones avaliable are in the U.S., and i’d rather not pay for P&P if I don’t have to.
Thanks for that link,** begbert2**!
Well, yes, but Lando has a nonstandard lego face. (He’s mustacio’d and, iirc, has eyebrows.) If you want the standard, two-dots-for-eyes-simple-curve-for-mouth lego face in ‘black-person’ color, the Bespin guard is the way to go.
Why won’t the yellow ones do?
Dunno if magic marker will cote evenly on plastic.
Spray paint might though. Get a light brown can and apply in layers till you have the desired color.
I’d like to do a particular movie (shortened) in which there’s a maximum of three black guys in a scene at the same time. I need four white (well, yellow) guys too, and then I can just switch heads onto different bodies for different characters.
I don’t think I can paint or otherwise colour the yellow heads - hands might be ok, but if I paint over the heads i’d then need to repaint the faces on them, and i’m just not that good an artist.
There are numerous styles of ‘white guy flesh’ colored heads out there, thanks to the Star Wars, Harry Potter, Spider Man, and Bat-man lines, among others–including a few figures with the standard 
face. (Hands are, of course, available as well.) So, you do have options there, too.
Mostly Clueless, wasn’t there a black minifig in one one of the cheaper Spiderman sets? I know there’s one in a Batman set, but that one’s not a cheap set. (Not that you have to buy the whole set to get a lego part, of course.)
Reading the thread title, I assumed you had quite a different scenario in mind.
Affirmative Action reaches into the world of Lego ???
:eek:
Actually, yes is does, from what I’ve heard. My understanding is that Lego men were given bright yellow skin to avoid them matching any natural skin tone at the expense of other skin tones. The classic lego face is also gender-neutral.