The life-size walking Gundam in Yokohama has finally closed its doors to the public, but it had a great send-off.
Back when the walking Gundam opened, I quickly made my way over and covered the whole thing. It was an impressive sight to see and while the Gundam didn’t technically “walk”, there was a great deal of engineering expertise involved to get the whole thing to move.
The design itself was also a custom variant of the original RX-78-2 Gundam, called the RX-78F00. The changes to the design were in part done to help the motion of each of the limbs, as at full scale there’s a lot more to take into account from an engineering standpoint.
In any case, the walking Gundam closed its doors on March 31st but had a fantastic and pretty long ceremony for fans to attend (shown below).
The event itself had a lot of fireworks, music and a rather epic drone light show. The latter is something that pops up a lot these days, but it was definitely done well here.
As for what’s next for life-size Gundams, we shall have to wait and see. We still have the life-size Unicorn Gundam outside Diver City in Tokyo and the Nu Gundam down in Fukuoka, not to mention the Freedom Gundam in Shanghai. So there’s a lot of life-size Gundams already out there.
However, I would still like to see a life-size Gundam brought to somewhere outside of Asia, that would definitely be cool.
For now though, we shall have to enjoy the more static life-size Gundam statues, as the walking Gundam has been put to rest.
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