About

LEGO Enthusiast | Star Wars Nerd

Hey there, I’m Thomas, the creative mind behind Obi-Wan Kenobricks!

I’ve been a LEGO fan since I was a kid (way back in the ’90s), and have always loved expressing myself creatively, building all kinds of crazy things from my imagination. Growing up, I spent countless hours playing Super Mario World and Zelda on my SNES, watching super hero cartoons and sci-fi movies on endless repeat, and of course building, tearing down, and rebuilding LEGO bricks in every way imaginable!

Like many people though, I went through what we in the LEGO community call a “Dark Age”, where I drifted away from the hobby and lost my passion for building and playing with LEGO – kind of like the Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, when he went into exile and abandoned his former ways…

For more than a decade I went on with my life as a regular, non-LEGO-obsessed person, relegating LEGO to a corner of my childhood memories (and my parents’ backyard tool shed). I followed other passions like music, got married to the woman of my dreams, had an amazing daughter of my own, and essentially just slowly melted into adulthood.

During the pandemic in 2020, however, I made the fateful decision to download TikTok just to see what it was all about. I had no plans to get behind the camera myself or anything, but I was curious, you know? At first, the content I saw was pretty generic – the kind of stuff that TikTok shows to everybody when they’re trying to figure out what you like. But it didn’t take long for the fabled TikTok algorithm to start showing me content from Star Wars creators. And of course a short jump from there took me to the even more niched-down LEGO Star Wars content.

I don’t know how long it was after I downloaded TikTok that I ended up posting my first video, but I do remember that it was seeing other people showing off their Star Wars sets that reignited my interest in LEGO again – particularly seeing a few posts about the 2008 Republic Attack Gunship, in fact. I started to search for other videos about the Republic Gunship to see if I could find anyone who had the original Republic Gunship from 2002, because that was the one that I remembered getting, back in the day. But no one else seemed to be posting about that one! I was both shocked and intrigued.

Not long after that, I called up my parents to see if they still had all my old LEGO sets, and thanks to the fact that my mom never gets rid of anything, they did indeed have every brick and piece, every set, and even almost every box, instruction booklet and LEGO Mania Magazine from when I was a kid! It was like hopping in a time machine and going right back to my childhood. Everything came flooding back to me; all the memories, all the excitement over creating new things and over seeing what cool new sets LEGO would come out with every season. Aquazone, Rock Raiders, all the different space factions of the ’90s, Fright Knights, Wild West, Pirates, Adventurers, Ninjas, Dragon Masters… so many memories, and so many things to rediscover!

Eventually, I found all my old Star Wars sets, going all the way back to the original release in 1999, with iconic sets like Luke’s Landspeeder and the Naboo Starfighter, up through the first AT-AT, and of course the 2002 Republic Gunship. Some of the sets were partially intact, while others had been reduced to spare parts. And it was then that I said to myself, “hey, I can rebuild these. I can rebuild all of it.” And I did.

My social media career took off when I started posting videos about my rediscovery of all the old LEGO sets from my childhood, and as I posted more and more content, I started connecting with other people – other fans of LEGO, other content creators and all kinds of people who shared the same interests as me! Finally, after years of believing that playing with LEGO was something you just couldn’t do as an adult, I realized how very wrong I had been, and how much I had been missing out on.

LEGO has had such a profound impact on people all over the world, and I count myself lucky to have rediscovered it today! The friendships I’ve made in just the last few years are some of the strongest I’ve ever had, and the warmth and positive energy of the LEGO community at large is truly incredibly, and unlike anything else out there.

Thanks to LEGO, I have the opportunity today to share my creativity and my passion for these little pieces of plastic with so many people on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and anywhere else I can!

Thank you for your support in following all of my various social channels. I could not possibly do any of this without you!