(Image: Screenshot from Big Iron LEGO video)
This is one well-done video… I debated some about sharing it here since we are not exactly a LEGO or animation-centric website, but we do like guns here — and Big Iron is one of my favorite Marty Robbins songs of all time.
A fellow fan of the song decided to make a video illustrating the story of the song — using LEGO stuff. And it turned out really cool!
The song tells a tale of an Arizona Ranger riding into the town of Agua Fria (cold water) with a “big iron on his hip” (a six-shooting single action revolver, naturally) and the intention to leave that same town with their local bad guy, an outlaw called Texas Red. It’s the classic “dead or alive” scenario, in which the Ranger doesn’t much care whether Texas Red is walking or draped over a horse when the time comes to leave town.
Texas Red, being a thoroughly experienced western bad guy, doesn’t fret about the Ranger who’d come to town to get him. He’d already buried 20 others who’d tried to take him, and he figured the Arizona Ranger would just be one more notch on his revolver’s grip. Oh, but when the gunfight actually happens, Red has a rude awakening…
There was forty feet between them when they stopped to make their play
and the swiftness of the Ranger is still talked about today…
Texas Red had not cleared leather ‘fore a bullet fairly ripped
and the Ranger’s aim was deadly with the big iron on his hip.
The quality of the stop-motion animation is really good, and attention to detail is too — for the most part. I enjoyed the snake slithering in two contiguous scenes, and the undertaker hanging around, knowing he was about to get some business from one or the other of the gunfighters.
Slight bummers are that, in the song, Texas Red never even got his gun out of his holster, but the limitations of the LEGO figures mean that he lacks a holster and simply holds his revolver in the video… and even though the Ranger had come to take Texas Red back with him, in the video he rides off into the sunset while the undertaker assumes control of Red’s corpse.
It took 23 days to make the video! That’s a lot of work for less than 4 minutes’ worth of watching… but it was worth it if you ask me.
Big Iron is a classic gunfighter song, and this video is the best homage I’ve ever seen paid it.
What do you think of this? Want to see more or less of this sort of thing here at AO? Please comment below.
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