When I was a kid back in the Seventies, they just started to import these really neat robot toys and models from Japan. This was about twenty years before the word anime came into the common English. Anyway there’s this guy named Sun Yun who builds robots, in the Japanese science fiction style, out of Lego. Apparently he’s not the only one.
Lego is ideal medium for building robots, as anyone whose ever played with MindStorms has found out. I’ve read that lots of budding engineers at MIT use it all the time.