Cereal City exhibit clicks into place

Stacy Hanna
The Enquirer

(photo credit)
John Grap/The Enquirer
(photo caption)
Allison Tribul, marketing manager at Cereal City U.S.A., plays with a Lego car from one of the displays that will be part of their Summer Block party.

Tony the Tiger, of course, in block form and featured in Kellogg’s Cereal City USA summer exhibit.
Larger-than-life statues of Tony, along with Snap, Crackle and Pop and the Kellogg’s Froot Loops box will be unveiled June 11 during Battle Creek’s Cereal Festival weekend. They’ll remain on display through September.

Cereal City USA, on West Michigan Avenue in downtown Battle Creek, is a nonprofit facility in its eighth year, commemorating the history of the cereal industry.
“We’re calling it (the exhibit) the Summer Block Party,” said Allison Tribul, Cereal City’s marketing manager.

“For the past couple of years, we’ve worked hard to add value to our summer exhibit,” she said. “This year’s attraction will be interactive, some place where kids can come play.”

Cereal City hopes to increase summer attendance — the museum’s busiest season by far.
“We saw an increase for the Tractor Days exhibit last year,” she said. “We want to top that this year with a hands-on experience. We hope it brings people back.”

The Lego-bricked structures will be present throughout the museum, but not near the large entrance windows.

“Apparently Legos fade,” Tribul said. “So in order to preserve them, they’ll be as far from the natural light as possible.”

Standing as high as six feet tall, each figure is constructed from thousands of Lego bricks. Snap, Crackle and Pop each are assembled from as many as 15,000 blocks. The Froot Loops box contains 25,000 pieces and Tony tops them all with 30,000 blocks total.

“Constructing Tony and his friends has been no small feat,” Tribul said. “Dozens of computer-generated drawings and hundreds of building hours have gone into this effort.”

Tribul said that in addition to the statues, there will be four display cases depicting smaller Lego-bricked scenes such as a cityscape and an underwater adventure, all engineered by a group of Michigan-based Lego-enthusiasts called Michigan Lego Users Group, or MichLUG.

“When we first had the idea for a Lego exhibit, back in January, we weren’t sure how to go about having them built,” Tribul said. “It turns out there are these clubs of adult Lego fans. We found our artists on the Internet.”

Larry Pieniazek is a member of MichLUG and coordinator of the Cereal City project.
He said about a dozen artists, scattered throughout the state, have been working on the figures since March, a later start than originally planned.

“When we first agreed to the project we thought Lego would be supplying the bricks,” Pieniazek said. “Then we found out they couldn’t fill the order, so we got a late start”

“They really only make orange Lego pieces once a year,” Tribul said. “So we found after-market suppliers, guys who actually buy Lego sets, sort them by color and re-sell the individual pieces.”
Tribul wouldn’t reveal the total cost of the project, but said the Lego bricks were purchased individually ranging from 5 to 15 cents per piece.

To capture the essence of Tony and friends, artists created scaled-down versions of the finished product.

“We had to flesh out some issues to determine what’s aesthetically pleasing as well as structurally sound,” Pieniazek said.

The completed statues were built over steel armatures and glued to ensure stability.
“We want kids to touch them and have their pictures taken with them,” Tribul said. “But we also want them to stay in one piece.”

Stacy Hanna covers business. She can be reached at 966-0468 or sthanna@battlecr.gannett.com

Originally published May 27, 2005