Constructing a Daniel Tiger Lego Set
My daughter loves Daniel Tiger. My daughter loves Lego. Why not see if anyone has ever put them together? 🤔
The Search
The first thing I did was a quick Kagi search to see if an official Daniel Tiger Lego set ever existed. It does tend to be a bit of an odd ask, given Daniel Tiger aimed at children aged 2-4 years old, and Lego are often a minimum of 3 years old1 due to their small pieces. Perhaps as expected, there are no official Daniel Tiger Lego sets. However, there was a Lego Ideas submission for a Duplo Daniel Tiger set.
It gained 250 supporters which is impressive again given the near-incompatible age ranges. Unfortunately, support waned and the campaign came to a close without moving forward. The age range issue is tough, but very kid is different, and for kids like mine, they are able to safely enjoy Lego and Daniel Tiger. Thankfully, I've got a childhood's worth of Lego in the closet and some creativity so I think I can create something for my daughter.
Going on a bear Tiger Hunt
Since there were no official sets, next up was to see if I could source tiger minifigures and construct the Tiger family using those pieces mixed with some I already own. The actual sets and clothes aren't a problem, but I do need tiger characters.
Surprisingly (or not), there are not many Lego tiger minifigs! Searching on Bricklink for tiger only yields 11 results as of this post. From those 11, only 3 felt like they could be passable as from Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood and 2 of them had only recently been released within the past 3 years, The ability to have tigers at all is brand new and further is why there hasn't been a Daniel Tiger x Lego crossover yet, even unofficially.
- The Year of the Tiger Guy, released in 2022. This minifig is very much a person in a tiger costume, which while that may be passable, isn't ideal.
- Tiger Woman, released in 2014. This minifig is more tiger-like, and comes with a tail. However, the face is a bit aggressive for what I want, and the character has long hair which doesn't match Daniel Tiger's family.
- Tiger Cub Suit Girl, released in 2020. This minifig is almost perfect, with a good tiger head and hat, and smaller legs for the kids Daniel and Margaret. The head and hat should also work for Mom, Dad, and Granpere characters.
I put in an order for 5 Tiger Cub Suit Girl minifigures, one for Daniel, Margaret, Mom, Dad, and Granpere from UTBrick via Bricklink. That set me back a good $34.22 including tax and shipping, however realistically that's at least what I'd be paying for a full set anyway and the tigers really make or break the experience. For Daniel and Margaret, the Tiger Cub Suit Girl should work well itself, and I can swap out the torso with a red jacket or pink jacket. I'm sure I have those around. For Dad Tiger, I'll have to see if I have orange legs, otherwise he may end up with yellow legs, but he'll have a blue jacket on. Mom Tiger only needs the tiger head along with a white/floral torso and pants. Granpere looks a lot like Dad Tiger, though I may be able to find a head with glasses like Granpere, perhaps like Dumbledore and use the tiger hat and it'll be close enough.
Won't You Ride Along With Me?
Having the Tiger family is nice, but their gateway to everything is Trolley, so to round out the set and bring it into parity with nearly every other Daniel Tiger toy, Trolley is required. Thankfully, Trolley is little more than a red car with yellow accents which I should have all of the pieces for. If I can manage to get a convincing Granpere, this may also be the first time Granpere is a toy. The largest character set I've seen only includes Daniel, his family, his stuffies, and his friends2.
The Set
Here is the final set, showing an official Trolley on the left and my Lego one on the right:
And here's a comparison of Lego minifigs to the official designs. Margaret's shirt could be better, but Gilderoy Lockhart came in handy for both Margaret's shirt and Mom Tiger's pants.
Trolley was built on a 6x16 black plate. This allows for all characters to be able to ride on Trolley at once and have the six openings and maintain similar dimensions to official the Daniel Tiger Trolley toy. Originally, I had the height of Trolley from floor to roof be 6 bricks tall, however I noticed when trying to position the characters through the flip-open roof that this was too deep to get my hand into. If my hand couldn't reach, there's not a chance my daughter's could, so I removed a brick in height and everything worked much better, as shown here with the roof open:
Photos will interchangeably show the two heights, as it wasn't until I was taking photos that I noticed the problem. This toy had to work for my daughter as a toy to use, and not as a model to sit on a shelf. Design considerations for that included:
- Flip-open roof for easy access
- Flat tiles along the top to allow for the roof to rest when closed without locking in
- Limited height of Trolley and additional plate on floor of Trolley to allow for ability to securely position Daniel Tiger minifigs
- Size kept to ensure Trolley will fit on road base plates and with other standard Lego sets
- Robust construction to survive being played with
The front and back of Trolley have windows to look in, as shown in these images, which also show Granpere who did end up using Dumbledore's face:
Instructions
After completing the project, I wondered how easy it would be to generate a 3D Model and instructions. Turns out, Lego fans are an inventive community and have many tools for doing this, largely centered around LDraw. From there I found LeoCAD which allowed me to pick from parts and create Trolley as a model and create instructions via Web Lic3.
Here's an image of the 3D model made in LeoCAD:
You can find the instructions and model on the GitHub repo I made for the model.
Footnotes 🐾
Duplo exists for younger children, as exemplified later in the post. However, Duplo also are outgrown fairly quickly, so I'd prefer to have something my daughter can grow into, even if she's into Daniel Tiger less and less over the years.↩
It's also not great quality. Between various family members gifts we've seen multiple sets and the paint rubs off quickly, arms may be wrong or backwards, and in one Daniel's legs were backwards with the tail on the front.↩
There's several different ways to generate instructions, and LeoCAD has a built in function to do it, but Web Lic had more focus on the presentation of instructions which allowed for a smoother process. Downside though is I did run into a couple instances where some pieces were not supported so I had to change my model a bit to get Web Lic to create instructions.↩