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A Super Bowl touchdown -- but with Lego. It took this Eagles fan 25 hours to create.

Gabriela Carroll, The Philadelphia Inquirer on

Published in Football

PHILADELPHIA — You wouldn’t know it from his videos, but Jimmy King actually only has two Eagles Lego minifigures.

King went viral for his stop-motion Lego reenactments of big moments from the Eagles' season. First, a Lego Saquon Barkley hurdle, then a viral Cooper DeJean hit on Derrick Henry, and finally the DeVonta Smith touchdown that iced Super Bowl LIX.

Football teams have 11 men on the field at a time, but King, a Philadelphia resident, uses just four figurines on his field, a 12-by-12-inch Lego tile, moving each one just millimeters to capture each frame.

“I did basically six different animations with two players at a time, and then layered them all on top of each other, which was maybe more ambitious,” King said. “But had to be done, because I needed to have 11 guys on the field at one point.”

Ambitious? Maybe, but it worked.

Despite their small size, King’s animations have reached an audience of millions.

King was born one of five in Bucks County, and he and all his siblings grew up building with Lego sets. But King was first inspired to experiment with stop motion after seeing the 1996 film adaptation of "James and the Giant Peach."

“My dad gave me his camera, and I started doing a couple of things where I’d use a camcorder and hit play and pause over and over,” King said. “I tried moving this little Humpty Dumpty clay guy that I made. I stopped from my teenage years through 30, basically.”

King lost most of his Lego sets in a house fire, but slowly rebuilt his collection with sets largely themed after his favorite movies and games, like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.

He took a few film classes in college, but ultimately chose not to pursue a creative career.

 

“At age 31, [I] felt like I had been missing a creative outlet for a long time, and was seeing stuff about Legos, and decided, maybe I’ll get back into this stop-motion thing I did as a kid,” said King, now 35. “I know a little bit more now as an adult, about how to set up a scene, lighting, angles, just basic rules of film that I didn’t know as a child, and the technology is so much better.”

He started with Star Wars stop-motion animations, but after seeing Barkley’s reverse hurdle against the Jacksonville Jaguars in person at Lincoln Financial Field, King knew he wanted to create an animation of it.

The resulting video quickly went viral, becoming his most-viewed stop motion ever, after the Eagles picked it up and posted it on TikTok.

But King was a bit embarrassed. He’d drawn out the numbers by hand, and didn’t love how they looked, since the jersey color was just a bit off. After the Birds won the Super Bowl, King made sure to print them out for his next animation, so they’d look cleaner.

The Super Bowl LIX video took almost 25 hours of work for just a 33-second video, since King had to photograph each pair of linemen individually and then Photoshop them together, and later add in facial expressions on his coach Nick Sirianni figurine.

But King values the time spent alone, working on his projects.

“It’s almost meditative,” King said. “I use my phone as my camera. I have put it on Do Not Disturb, because the vibration of a text message can move the camera and ruin a shot.

“I get my studio area, which is in my room, nice and dark, put some studio lights, set up a scene, and then it can be sometimes five hours straight of animating, in which case, it’s quiet, with me just making motion as I go, trying to mimic real-life movement as much as possible.”

And the Eagles gave him plenty to draw from last season.


©2025 The Philadelphia Inquirer. Visit inquirer.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

 

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