China’s Knockoff Gundam: A Makeover of The Extreme Kind
China’s obsession with copycat products is as powerful as the Japanese obsession for high tech and robots. Before now, never the twain hath met, or at least so many might have believed.
But when a life-sized Gundam, Japan’s most beloved robot, was deliberately copied in every aspect and placed in an amusement park in China’s Sichuan province for all to sort of admire, all hell broke loose.
The amusement park did not get away with its transgression and so much pressure was put upon its owners that not only was the statue taken down, they also pretended that it had never been up in the first place!
But the copycat urge appears to be deeply rooted in the Chinese national psyche and the imitating powers-that-be could not resist another attempt to remodel their genuine imitation Gundam.
They went so far the other way that now it doesn’t even vaguely resemble a Gundam. (With all their creativity, one can only wonder why they didn’t harness all that copycat effort to make their own truly original creation.)
The new copy of whatever this is bears shoulder spikes and tubes and a weird extended nose that render a very bizarre appearance. This mechanized thing also runs on nuclear power. It no longer look anything like a Gundam, but some say it does look more than a little bit like the MS-07B Gouf.
Closer scrutiny reveals that this new “copy” doesn’t look like anything specific at all, except maybe a very ugly thing.
Gundam still lives, albeit in a world among many would be imposters.
(Link)
By MDeeDubroff on 08-02-2011
