Totally Normal Town: Final Roundup!!

 I've finally finished editing the latest batch of TotallyNormalTown videos!!

Here's the "4th Wall Breaker" where I explained all of the buildings in the current iteration of our little sity-under-the-stairs -- what I was going for and my plans for the future:

 

 

The above is a companion video to the series of posts I wrote with explanations of the theme of the town and the various buildings:

•  LeGo Urbanist!! 
• Elsa's Totally Normal Castle 
• Welcome to our Little Japanese Corner! 
• Straddling the Tectonic Plates (again)! 
• For the Love of the Arts! 
• Power and Construction! 
• Time for Space College!! 

Nico has decided that it's time to wrap up the Totally Normal Town story series, so we made one last episode: Forks in the Road!! Here's the trailer:

 

And here's the full video:

 There are a total of six episodes of Totally Normal Town, spanning seven years!! In three of the episodes, the town gets completely destroyed. Here's the playlist so you can watch the whole saga!! 

Time for Space College!!

 

Another beloved character from Totally Normal Town got an upgraded location: Leo Deblin!!

Leo Deblin is a hilarious character created by Roy Wood Jr. for the Daily Show. He's an entrepreneur with a brick-and-mortar barber school in a strip-mall that he's constantly using as a headquarters for new business ventures. At least it was a little storefront in a strip-mall (next to Little Ceasar's) back in 2022. 

 Now Leo Deblin's Space College has a state-of-the-art facility upstairs from his "Institute of Barbering". Complete with a flight simulator for the students to learn to pilot!

 

And there's even a rocket simulator with a cockpit -- currently in use by Leo Deblin himself:

 

In the ground floor of the same building, there's a bakery café:

 

The bakery includes a nice terrace in back where you can enjoy your pastries:

 

There's also convenient access to public transportation, and for fun I included a stained-glass window with a mermaid on it.

I couldn't have this building open up in the usual ways: Since the seilbahn tracks are attached to the roof, I couldn't have the roof come off, and it's not on the edge of the tectonic plates either. So instead I designed the façades of both the bakery and the barbering institute as separate pieces that can be taken off to reveal the interior.

In the "Institute of Barbering" I put up a poster that I constructing by piecing together two screenshots from Leo Deblin's commercials.

So Chewbacca can learn to cut hair and pilot a spacecraft in one place! 

Power and Construction

 I'm going to have to stop working on Totally Normal Town for a while (so I can work on some of my other projects), but there are still vacant lots waiting for more buildings to be built! What to do?

I use my old stand-by: construction sites!

 

As I've said, many of the buildings in this town are new designs for buildings from 2022, but the two cranes you see in Totally Normal Town go back farther in time than that!

 

I designed this crane build in back in 2011!! For a town I built on my coffee table in my previous apartment!

(It's remarkable how much better I've gotten at this since 2011 -- and yet there are a fair number of ideas from that city that I still use today.)

I also built a wind-farm to serve as the power-plant:

 

I'm not really thrilled with the design, though. I like the forest of brightly-colored wind turbines, but I think the grey framework is too bulky -- you can't really see the florescent battery cylinders as much as I would like.

 When I start building again (probably in 2026 or 2027) my plan is to un-build the power plant and redesign a better version of it on the back of the lot (where the construction site is currently). Then in the front lot (where the wind-farm is now) I'll build an improved version of the factory from the 2022 Totally Normal Town.

 

For the love of the arts!

 

The theater is one of the few buildings in this town that is entirely new (not just a new version of an earlier building). Since my objective is to make a toy version of a great place to live, I asked myself what I'd like to have right in the middle of the town.

The answer was obvious: a theater! Especially considering what fun we've been having as members of a local theatre club ourselves.

I added a sculpture gallery upstairs to help make it a fun cultural outing for tourists and locals alike:

Tickets are sold from one corner of the façade, and the main entrance is at the other.

 

And you can enjoy a refreshing beverage at the rooftop bar during intermission or any time!

 

Straddling the tectonic plates (again)!

Totally Normal Town is built on a set of three separate serving tables -- each on wheels -- which we jokingly call the "tectonic plates." This allows easy access to all of the buildings -- despite the fact that the town is shoved into a corner under the staircase.

This design also allows another strategy to build complete buildings (with all four walls) and still have the interior easily accessible:

 

Like in an earlier Totally Normal Town, I put the supermarket on the ground floor of the split building (again with the Joyce Bysers MiniFigure at the cash register).

 Unlike last time, though, I didn't put "Chez François" upstairs because in this town François got much nicer digs:

So this time I put my own family's apartment above the supermarket:

 

Also on the ground floor, on one side, I added a pharmacy and a post office. On the interior side, I gave the pharmacy and post office both counters that face the interior of the supermarket, so people can pick up their prescriptions and mail their packages while doing their grocery shopping:

I put a cash machine in the post office because of course the post provides banking services:

Of course our apartment has a nice large balcony full of flowers and a nice table for outdoor dining -- and of course I added solar panels on the roof:

 ... with nice interior decor as well:

 

Welcome to our little Japanese corner!

 Like most of the builds in the current incarnation of Totally Normal Town, our Japanese corner is a new take on a build I did for the 2022 Totally Normal Town.

 

The dojo I had built back then had an imposingly large façade -- it was quite wide and tall -- but it wasn't deep at all -- it was ridiculously narrow from front to back. This was largely due to the constraint of the the shape of the lot -- too much real estate was devoted to roads for cars.

This time, I wanted to take advantage of a full corner lot to create a dojo with a square footprint -- so it's actually possible to practice martial arts inside.

Both the top and bottom floors are both square and both have sliding doors (the back of the top floor has window panes that don't slide, but the front panels do):

 

I surrounded it with an entire Japanese garden with a torii gate and flowering fruit trees and a stream with a little bridge.

 And in the corner I added a little shrine:

 

The one thing I miss most from the earlier version was the little lava monster that was integrated into the build. It has nothing to do with Japan, but it was cute.

Elsa's Totally Normal Castle!

 One of the complaints I got when I first built the funicular is that once you ride it to the top, there's nothing up there. This was one of my motivations for building a very tall Hogwarts next door:

Now I've increased the number of buildings you can reach from up there by building a tall castle for Elsa right next door to Hogwarts...

... complete with an extendable-retractable footbridge so that Elsa's castle can be accessed by crossing through the divination balcony of Hogwarts.

 

The objective of this build was to make it look like the castle is built right into the rock of the mountain. So I followed a similar design to the mountain castle tower that I had made for an earlier incarnation of Totally Normal Town, complete with a waterfall!

 

I'm pretty pleased with this build because I think I "made it look easy" -- as if I had just snapped together some pieces that were designed and intended for a Frozen castle:

This is not at all the case. Yes, the pieces with the sparkly stickers on them (in particular the balcony pieces) were from an Elsa's castle set. However, the set I have is a very simple children's play set (as you can see from when we rebuilt it for our Christmas village) -- so I had to start from scratch with a completely different design, piecing together whatever crazy/random pieces I could find in my bins with the right color scheme.

 

I added some interior details for Ana and the snow creatures, and left the back open since this build is essentially always up against the back wall.

 

 

Totally Normal Town 2025: LeGo Urbanist!

The objective of this current incarnation of Totally Normal Town is to create a toy version of a city that would be an awesome place to live!

 To that end, I've narrowed the roads and eliminated private autos -- the entire downtown is accessible through walking, biking, and public transportation!

Designing original Lego builds is incredibly time-consuming, so a big chunk of this town was built in 2024. In my earlier post, you can see that the Seilbahn (cable car) in the center of the town was the first thing I built. This build included the large, top-heavy central building with the train station on the bottom floor, two floors of Totally Normal Town's fancy French restaurant ("Chez François") in the middle, and the upper station of the Seilbahn on the roof. 

This initial build also included the two ground-level Seilbahn stations, as well as the open-air market. You can also see in that same post that Nico's "Freddy Fazbear's Pizza" was also one of the original buildings, followed soon by my build of Hogwarts.

Then, after a pause of several months, I started building again this past Spring.

(As you can see from my earlier posts, many of these buildings are actually new versions of buildings from an earlier incarnation of Totally Normal Town: Chez François, Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, Hogwarts -- even the fruit stand in the market!)

I'll follow this post with some posts about the new buildings!

A "Film Noir" murder mystery in Totally Normal Town!!!

 We just got done making a fun new video in Totally Normal Town!! Here's the trailer:

And here's the complete video:

 

Our Totally Normal School: Hogwarts!!

 Now that I've completed our latest building, we can begin filming our next episode!!

The new building is the kids' school -- Hogwarts -- which is accessible from the Seilbahn Bergstation!! (If you don't recall what that is, please see my earlier post.)

I would like to start right off the bat with an apology to the trans community. Hogwarts has been a key part of Totally Normal Town since the first episode in 2018 -- long before J.K. Rowling decided to devote her life (and giant platform) to being the world's biggest spokesperson for transphobia.

At the time of this writing, Rowling is currently being sued for having spread the false claim that a women's boxing Olympic gold medalist is a man (she is, in fact, a cis woman) -- a claim that could potentially endanger her life if vigilantes in her native Algeria believe it.

Also problematic is the fact that Rowling has specifically pointed to the continued popularity of the Harry Potter franchise as evidence that people agree with her bigoted transphobic rhetoric. So, even though I built this new castle mostly from parts from two old sets from 2011 and 2019, I'm still potentially bolstering her claims by including Hogwarts in this new 2024 build.

I would counter that the lion's share of what makes Hogwarts fun is the atmosphere created by the set design and music, not to mention that nearly all of the best British actors have played roles in the film series. Here's an example:

Snape is a good character, but Alan Rickman's Snape is a great character.

For this build, I found that I had lots of spiders and spider webs (largely from various Spider-man mini-figs), so I decided that this incarnation of Hogwarts should start with potions class in the dungeon.

This is the first time I've included a light brick in an original build of mine. I thought it would look cool to add red light coming from the stand under Snape's cauldron, and I was right.

Of course the most important Hogwarts professor for Totally Normal Town is Professor Trelawney -- she's the one who repeatedly (and accurately!) predicts the destruction of Totally Normal Town!

In this build, Professor Trelawney and her sister "Trofessor Prelawney" share the open terrace floor that connects by stairs with the Seilbahn station. They also have owl (and other bird) perches, plus space for crystal balls and tea sets.

For Hogwarts and the restaurant/station next door I built backs that open so that they can potentially be photographed from all sides. Since these two buildings are up against the back wall, this isn't really necessary, but it adds to the fun of the build.

The room at the top of the tower is a common room, including all of the various pets, plus Slughorn disguised as a chair.

We had so many wands that I thought it would be funny to put bins and barrels and chests of them all over the place. We'll see if Nico adds a joke to the script about why there are so many spare wands.

The main floor has a dining hall.

This was a really fun build to make, and I like having Hogwarts as a part of our Totally Normal Town -- even though I already had serious reservations about the Harry Potter universe even before Rowling became the queen of the transphobes.

...But that should perhaps be a separate post.

Let's close with the two trams -- since this incarnation of Totally Normal Town is a transit paradise!!

You can probably see that these two trams follow the same design as the trams from the Christmas version of Totally Normal Town.

All these photos are certainly going to make this post take forever to load, so if you've made it this far, congrats and thanks for your attention!