Winnipegger’s Lego prime minister talking to Canada’s kids goes viral

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This article was published 05/04/2020 (1481 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg dad has gone viral after giving a speech from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addressing Canadian kids a Lego makeover.

Trudeau reached out to children experiencing changes in their day-to-day life in the midst of COVID-19 during a press briefing on March 22, something marketing manager Tyler Walsh said he had flagged to show his two sons.

The idea to add Lego figurines to the speech’s audio came to him while he had already been working on a different Lego stop-motion project with his two sons.

“It just kind of occurred to me that we’d got everything set up here, what if I took this really cool speech that the prime minister did and combine that with some of the Lego stop-motion effects, and people might think that’s kind of fun,” he said.

The process took around 12 hours total, including finding Lego look-alikes for Shared Health chief nursing officer Lanette Siragusa and chief provincial public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin — both of whom have become familiar to Manitobans during the pandemic — and building several sets.

It has resonated with people all over the world, amassing over 250,000 views on Twitter, getting a retweet from the official Lego account and earning some congratulatory words from the prime minister himself.

“I think my kids — and a whole lot of others — will get a kick out of this, all while hearing how they can help out too,” Trudeau wrote on Twitter.

The widespread connection comes from the powerful words behind the figurines, Walsh said.

“I think the message itself was powerful because I think that a lot of parents are sort of questioning how they should talk to their kids about everything that’s going on,” he said.

“So to hear something from the prime minister that sort of sums it up nicely and why we have to do what we do and the whole message there — the message itself resonated.”

Walsh said while the stop-motion process was “super-tedious,” he was happy the end result was a resource for parents to introduce difficult new concepts to their children.

“When you combine it with something that kids might actually enjoy watching or be drawn to, it just works so well together, and then that message would be pushed out further,” he said.

“So I think there’s just a lot of parents that are like, ‘Oh my goodness, this is perfect, I’ll show my kids this; it’s safe to show them, and it’s put in a way that they will understand.’”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: malakabas_