The Danish toy company Lego is perhaps most famous for its namesake brand, a set of building bricks that lets children’s imaginations run wild. The 2014 Warner Bros. release of The Lego Movie was a surprise hit – grossing over $469 million out of a $60 million budget.
In addition, it’s spawned two spinoff films – one based on the Lego Ninjago line, and one featuring a mini figure version of Batman (voiced by Will Arnett). That alone showed how much staying power the brand has among children across the globe despite a growing preference among Americans to digital screens.
The film will be getting a sequel titled The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part and is set for a February 8. The sequel will feature a cameo appearance by....a Lego version of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg? And how can one tell about the level of Lego’s excitement with this? Ginsburg popped up in some of the promos and trailers. Here's one:
In an interview with USA Today, director Mike Mitchell gushed over Ginsburg:
These movies are so full of surprises. And we were thinking, ‘Who’s the last person you would think to see in a Lego film as a minifig?’ Ruth Bader Ginsburg! And we’re all huge fans. It made us laugh to think of having her enter this world.
What is Warner Bros. thinking? It’s one thing to be a member of the Hollywood left, but to blatantly insert a liberal Supreme Court justice in an apolitical cartoon is another. When was the last time today’s Hollywood featured a glowing appearance of, say, Clarence Thomas?
For the record, this appearance by a liberal politician or judge isn’t as blatant as Hillary Clinton’s respective appearances on the CBS’s Madam Secretary and Murphy Brown. But, a cameo like this still seems out of place for a children’s movie, especially one based on one of the most iconic toy lines in the world.
Then again, this isn’t the first time a piece of children’s media propagandized towards younger children about Ginsburg. In 2016, CBS’s publishing division Simon & Schuster published a children’s book celebrating her Court tenure and painting her as its moral leader. And of course The Washington Post was thrilled. NewsBusters columnist Kristine Marsh had this brilliant response to the book:
One can only imagine how a children’s book from Simon & Schuster on the late Antonin Scalia would portray him, if they say in this one that he was against “helping” immigrants, women and African-Americans.
The same thing goes with The Lego Movie 2. If the filmmakers behind it were to make a mini-figure of Scalia for this movie, then it would probably get the same kind of hostile treatment to prove Marsh’s point.
This recent attempt at propaganda in an upcoming kids movie is yet another example of how Ginsburg has become a cult of personality in liberal Hollywood and so-called news media. It’s also proves how Warner Bros. is no better than sister company CNN in promoting left-wing causes.
