Review: 4000020 H.C. Andersen's Clumsy Hans

[legojeroen]

Hi there and welcome to this review! I hope you will enjoy this review of a quite rare set. Before I start off I would like to tell you about how we got to building this set and some background story of the set.

In 2014 me and my girlfriend were among the lucky few selected for the 2015 Inside Tour. As there are already great articles about the Tour I'm not going to write a lot about it, but fact is that we had a blast and made some new friends.

As always with the end of the Tour, a special set is given out to the attendees. That's years set was one we were very happy with. As big fairy tale fans we were thrilled that the set was based on a story of one of the greatest fairy tale writers ever. Also, the set was based on a wooden model wich was made by Lego in the early years. The specific wooden model was the first ever wooden model with the representation of a human being. I accidentally made a picture of it in the Idea House, wich I found out afterwards when going to our photo album.

Here on the right you can see the wooden model as displayed in the Idea House. The wooden model is designed by Dagny Holm, a niece of Lego founder Ole Kirk Kristiansen. She made the wooden model around 1936. Later, when Lego started with plastic bricks, Dagny returned to the company and made one of Lego. Because Lego didn't have many different pieces back then, there were limited possibilities with making life like models. Despite that she and her team always tried to make the models as life-like as possible.

So, you may ask yourself: with all this awesome stuff about this set and how like it and such, why didn't you build it right away? Well things have it's reasons. Unlike some (small group of) others I would not ever consider selling this. There is to much 'emotional' value to this set, wich can't be expressed in any money. Me and my girlfriend were in the progress of getting our own house and we promised each other that the first set being build there would be this one. And a little over a year later it was finally the time to build!

blablabla background story, emotions, blabla get to the review! Okay, here we go!

Box/Instructions

The box is different then any other Lego set. It basically is a plain withe architecture style box with a sleeve. Printed on the sleeve is off course the set itself, a picture of Dagny and the set information. Each copy has it's unique handwritten set number and was signed on the spot by the designer, Steen Stig Andersen.

On the back of the box we find the story of Dagny and a photo of all the participants of the tour. For their privacy I won't post that picture here.

The instruction booklet features a kind of paper wich feels different then the normal booklet. The first pages feature the whole fairy tale of Clumsy Hans, wich is a quite funny story!

And before the building fun begins, we get to see the confused minifigre looking a pile of unsorted bricks.

Parts

Well let's follow the instructions of being a happy person and sort the bricks! When we open the plain white box we find what looks like some heat sealed bags, wich again, is different than any other Lego set.

A lot of 1x1 and 2x1 plates in different colors are what make the inventory of this set. There are two exclusive printed pieces in this set:

It looks like we're all sorted! Let's start building!

The build

We start off with building the base of the model. It starts like a Architecture set; snapping plates together and lining it with black tiles. After that we add more terrain details and we can see where Hans and his goat will be placed.

With the next steps we build the tree, wich is a lot bigger then I imagined. More details are added to the base, showing a small pond.

Next up is the star of the show: Hans himself! Hans is riding a goat (called Billy) and holding a dead crow and a wooden shoe, filled with mud. Hans gets a classic Lego yellow brick build head, wich is a nice touch.

The completed model

After about 2 hours the model is completed and it looks great. It has a very old-style look and feel to it and it's bigger in size then I thought.

Overall opinion

It is very very hard for me to give a totally neutral opinion about this set, because it is very special to me. Not just because of the exclusivity of this set, but also because it holds a lot of very good memories. What I can say is that this set has zero playability. Unlike some other Inside Tour sets this is a true display model, nothing else.

I hope you liked reading this review and wish everyone trying to get on a future Inside Tour the best of luck with getting selected. If you have the money for it, I highly recommend any fan of Lego to go when they can.