Tokyo Bids Farwell To Life-Sized Gundam Statue With Clever Anime Nod

If you are a fan of Mobile Suit Gundam, then you may have dreamt of trekking to Tokyo and seeing the city’s life-sized mecha statue. Back in 2012, DiverCity was gifted a massive mobile suit replica from Mobile Suit Gundam that stood at over 55′ tall. However, the geeky tourist attraction has now been sent into retirement. Recently, Bandai took down the life-sized statue to make way for a new one.

However, the company wasn’t willing to let the mecha go without a bit of fanfare. Before the statue was fully disassembled, Bandai made sure to recreate a famous scene from Mobile Suit Gundam using the statue.

The crew’s carefully planned the statue’s deconstruction to ensure it made the ‘Last Shooting’ stance from Mobile Suit Gundam. The famous pose was featured at the end of the anime when the RX-78-2 suit fired off its last energy canon in battle. Missing an arm and its head, Bandai used the subtle nod to honor Tokyo’s popular mecha before it traveled elsewhere.

Of course, the replica wasn’t exactly the same as what fans saw in the anime. The statue’s construction made it impossible for the crews to extend its intact arm skyward, but fans got the gist.

Prior to the statue’s removal, DiverCity made sure to properly honor the attraction. The park held a memorial exhibit for the suit up until March 5, and its second-half was called ‘Gundam Statue Gundam Front Tokyo: Last Shooting Campaign.’ From the the name alone, fans can all but confirm DiverCity intended to recreate the ‘Last Shooting’ shot when its own suit was hauled away.

If you are sad to see Mobile Suit Gundam being whisked away from DiverCity, then you will only need to mourn for a short while. This fall, a brand-new mecha suit will be coming to the area. The mobile suit will be based off the RX-Unicorn Gundam from Mobile Suit Gundam UC.

The RX-0 Unicorn Gundam is the flagship model of the UC project. It is featured heavily in the Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn RE:0096 series. If you are unfamiliar with the anime, you can read Crunchyroll’s synopsis below:

“U.C. 0096. Three years after Char’s Rebellion, Banagher Links, a boy living at the manufacturing colony Industrial 7, meets a mysterious girl who calls herself Audrey Burne. Audrey claims that she is trying to stop the Vist Foundation from handing over Laplace’s Box to the Neo Zeon remnants known as the Sleeves, an act which could spark another war, and Banagher decides to help her. But the colony becomes a battlefield as fighting breaks out between the Sleeves and the Earth Federation Forces, who have also come to stop the handover…”

[HT] ANN