The Night Mail

Here's a unique little find - "The Night Mail," a famous British documentary from 1936 that followed the passage of the "Down Postal" from London to Glasgow over the line of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway.

Here it is, in three parts:

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WO7JxYlhOM
Part 2:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pQJzZDIQTs&feature=related
Part 3:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=902G8widi00&feature=related

The poetry is an Auden piece, commissioned specially for the film. The scenes are slightly shocking, in the way films of the past always are: they dressed so differently, and they did things differently, too: no special protection before you duck under a train in those days, and no computers - those men working in the signal towers are manipulating primitive lever-operated mechanical interlocking machines. It was still a world firmly in the steam age.

There's something touchingly tragic about the organization and the technology that's on display here - they're superificially impressive, but already a bit outdated: when The Night Mail was made, the first jets were less then ten years away. This was an England that was passing slowly away: Stanley Baldwin was Prime Minister for the elderly George V (whose cipher you can see on the mail vans: "GR"), and George Orwell was somewhere out there in the dark in the Midlands gathering the material for The Road to Wigan Pier.

So all that being said, how on earth do you improve on a classic like this, while simultaneously conveying some impression of how the world has changed since 1936?

Easy - you do it with Legos!