For six months, something felt just a little off in Tokyo. After years of drawing travelers to the capital’s Odaiba neighborhood, last March the full-scale statue of iconic anime robot Gundam was disassembled, and while the dismantling was handled in an awesome way, for half a year there’s been a mecha-sized hole in fans’ hearts.
But now things are OK again. Actually, they’re better than OK, because on Sunday, Tokyo’s new Gundam statue made its official debut, and it’s even bigger than the old one!
Based on the RX-0 Unicorn Gundam (from Gundam Unicorn, the most recent Gundam anime set within the franchise’s original Universal Century timeline), the 1:1-scale replica is 19.7 meters (64.6 feet) tall, 1.7 meters taller than its predecessor statue of the old-school RX-78-2 Gundam.
The Unicorn also feels bigger thanks to the chunkier armor plating on its arms, shoulders, and legs. As mentioned above, the RX-78-2 was designed for the very first Gundam TV series from the late 1970s, which meant it had to be animated entirely by hand and thus needed to keep its lines simple. Gundam Unicorn, on the other hand, was a lavish production that began in 2010, and having computer graphics as a visual option lets the RX-0 have a much more complex form.
