posted August 25, 2008 10:58 PM               

The Lego minifigure was first manufactured and packed into a LEGO set the morning of August 25, 1978. Children of all ages and Lego employees around the world today commemorated the milestone by kicking off Go Miniman Go!, a movement that aims to inspire generations of LEGO children to reconnect with the adventures their minifigures enabled them to live through creative, constructive Lego play.

In 1973, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, son of the company founder, challenged designers to add a new dimension of play to the Lego building experience, leading to the first Lego figures - a family created from a combination of Lego bricks and special elements to build people. A smaller figure, a simple head on an unmoving body, was introduced in 1975. Godtfred's son, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, introduced play themes to the Lego System of building toys, signaling a need for a more realistic, moving figure that had more role play ability for children. Sketch after sketch led to the design of nearly 50 different prototypes and crude models before company executives chose the contemporary minifigure. A patent was filed in 1977, and the first minifigures were manufactured and put into sets for the world to enjoy -- in time for the holiday season of 1978 -- in the Town, Space and Castle themes.

The very first minifigure was a police officer, followed by a fireman, a
nurse, astronauts, medieval knights, a gas station attendant and a
construction worker.

Various changes to the basic design followed, but the first to appear with a NASA logo and to be modeled after a real spacesuit came in 2003 with the limited release Lunar Lander (10029). The two included figures wore Apollo-style spacesuits, consistent with the set's NASA-approved theme.

Lego astronaut minifigures have flown on the space shuttle and in 2004, landed on Mars with the Spirit and Opportunity rovers.

In the past three decades, over four billion minifigures -- astronauts included -- have been produced; that's more than 12 times the population of the United States. Every second, 3.9 minifigures are sold around the world.