Ever wondered why your LEGO minifigures are buying, selling and eating food that’s often incredibly oversized? The reason lies in one of the LEGO Group’s strangest themes.
There are roughly 7,500 varieties of apple grown around the world. Among the biggest is the Hokuto apple, grown in Japan and officially recognised by the Guinness World Records in 2005 as the world’s heaviest apple. (That record-breaking specimen weighed in at a monstrous 1.85kg.) But unless your LEGO minifigures exclusively eat Hokutos, the standard LEGO apple isn’t really in proportion to them.
You can say the same for all sorts of LEGO food: carrots, bananas, cherries, sausages… the list goes on. They’re all fun pieces and in most cases immediately identifiable for what they’re supposed to be, but when you think about it they’re all massively oversized compared to minifigures. And there’s a reason for that: they were never designed for minifigures at all.
As Cheesey Studios points out in his latest deep dive into a retro LEGO theme, these elements all originated in Belville, a product line marketed to girls that debuted in 1994 and remained part of the LEGO portfolio all the way up to 2009. That 15-year stint has yet to be matched even by Friends, which aims for roughly the same target audience – although it’s safe to assume it will do so next year – yet Belville is rarely mentioned in LEGO circles.
That’s perhaps because the set design was in many ways quite far removed from the rest of the LEGO portfolio, with large elements the order of the day. These were Juniors-style sets long before that moniker caught on in Billund, and like Friends they also eschewed minifigures – although instead of mini-dolls, Belville sets included more realistic and life-like dolls (alongside some genuinely unsettling baby dolls).
Those characters were much larger than LEGO minifigures, and the kitchens spotted across various Belville sets were stocked with food designed to their proportions: carrots, bananas, cherries, sausages… you see where we’re going with this. Yep, many of the classic LEGO food elements still in circulation today originated in Belville.
So, next time you’re building a LEGO set with food in it – 31168 Medieval Horse Knight Castle, or 10365 Captain Jack Sparrow's Pirate Ship, for example – and wondering whether that single apple could feed a family of four for a week, at least you’ll know why.
Check out Cheesey Studios’ Belville retrospective for more on this unorthodox LEGO theme.
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