Gigaaaaaaaaantor!
Erecting an 18-meter high robot statue in Japan may not shock and awe as it would in the US of A, but a brightly colored, 70-ton Gigantor is still apt to catch quite a few eyes. Kobe, Japan is set to be the home of the mammoth tribute statue, which will simultaneously commemorate the life of the late Mitsuteru Yokoyama and the revitalization of the surrounding areas since the 1995 Kobe earthquake.
Yokoyama was the artist who created Gigantor, as well as several other manga series including a long-running serial retelling of the Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
I remember watching Gigantor when I was a kid and I enjoyed it a lot. Who wouldn’t enjoy a story of an adventurous boy and his ginormous robot? Come to think of it, I tended to enjoy stories about adventurous boys and their ginormous robots. There was Gigantor where the giant robot was controlled by remote (which led to endless plots as nefarious agents of shadowy organizations bent on world domination tried to get their hands on Jimmy Sparks’ remote control).
Beyond that, though, there was Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot which, for some reason, featured a robot who looked like an Egyptian Pharoah and a villain who resembled Cthulhu except that he was blue. Sokko was also adapted from a Yokoyama work called Giant Robo. There was also Ultraman (the original Ultraman. I didn’t even know about the bazillion other varieties of Ultra-whatevers). He didn’t have a little boy buddy, though the little boy who always tagged along with The Science Patrol seemed to know his secret identity.
Kobe gets no argument from me about their memorial. I think a Gigantor statue is a pretty appropriate memorial to a giant creator of giant stories that fired imaginations on other continents.
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Category: Pop Culture
