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Monday, March 14, 2005

Most useful face?

There are tons of minifig heads to choose from, but the scared man found in four of the Monsters sets seems to be the one that vignette builders turn to again and again (along with, perhaps, the classic smiley).


This head finds use any time a fig finds themselves in an upsetting situation, such as Patrick's Kabaya Ghost Stories, my Black Diamond, Chris's The Charge of the Black Knight, Ley's Jumper, Moko's Ski, Nelson's Wizard Woes, Weapons Testing and Halloween, Rocco's Guillotine, Toxic and Zombie, Josh's Stocks and Consequences, Stephen's Lecture, and Nathan's Exorcism, Christmas Lights Fiasco, Sleepy Hollow, and Precarious Moment vignettes. I'm sure there are several others that I've missed as well.

This raises the question of "Why?". Is there something particularly humorous about putting little plastic figures in perilous situations? Is it funnier to have this head in a dangerous situation, or the classic smiley (as found for instance in Adrian's Super-Agent scenes)? Why the scared man head and not his counterpart scared woman (she does appear in vigs, but not nearly as often)? What do you think? What does the prevalence of the scared man reveal about our own inner fears?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Heh good question, but could it be because the people who built these fearful vignettes are male? That way they can easier associate themselves with a scared male face rather than the scared face of a woman?

Anonymous said...

Ouch Sorry about all those double posts, but I did not think blogger had registered my comment...

Bruce said...

No problem. I tried to delete the duplicates, but Blogger seems to have left a "This post has been removed by the blog administrator." message. I'm still new to this format.

Probably right that it's related to the fact that the builders I cited are mostly (all?) male--we confront our own fears via the figs. Perhaps there is also some form of chivalry there in that we feel less comfortable putting female figs in perilous settings?

Anonymous said...

Hmm... interesting thought.
I had not thought of it that way before, but I feel that you are right.

Anonymous said...

i think it is because a scared male ,steriotypically, has to be scared more than it takes to scare a woman, so making the scare well, more scary