Guinness grants glory to Grendizer.

The very first anime I ever watched was UFO Robot Grendizer. “You see the characters’ eyes? That’s how they draw them in Japan,” my brother explained, completely unaware of how significant that information was going to become in my life to follow.

Technically what I watched was Force Five: Grandizer, the version of the series dubbed and localized for release in the U.S. And while Grandizer never really made it all that big in America, Grendizer managed to earn some very passionate fanbases outside Japan, including in Saudi Arabia, which is now home to a Grendizer statue that’s not just full-scale, but even larger than the one that appeared in the super robot classic created by Go Nagai.

Recently added to the Boulevard World amusement park/entertainment complex in Saudi Arabia’s capital city of Riyadh, the Grendizer statue is 33.7 meters (110.6 feet) tall. That’s actually 3.7 meters taller than the robot’s official height within the anime/manga, and not only is the Grendizer statue bigger than its source material, it’s bigger than any other anime mecha statue in the world. Its closest contender is Fukuoka’s 20.5-meter Nu Gundam, followed by Tokyo’s 19.7-meter Unicorn Gundam, Shanghai’s 18.03-meter Freedom Gundam, and Yokohama’s 18-meter original Gundam, and Kyoto’s 15-meter Evangelion Unit-01. That size supremacy has now earned the Grendizer statue official recognition by the Guinness World Records association as “the world’s largest metal sculpture of a fictional character.”

The statue was built with cooperation from Manga Productions, a Saudi Arabian animation production company, as part of its new licensing agreement to promote the Grendizer franchise in amusement parks and entertainment venues in the Middle East.

Source: PR Times, Manga Productions
Images: PR Times
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