A Tale of Two Gundams

I am no expert on Chinese piracy but the examples presented to us are sometimes ridiculous, but this one probably takes the cake. Before I get to that let me share some things I do know. In the past I have mistakenly purchased bootleg soundtracks from Hong Kong/China, and then there's the whole copying thing.

I can't remember which show was copied, maybe it was Haruhi? This is a pamphlet cover for the Beijing Olympics.

Oh wait I think it was Shinkai's 5 cm per second...

Japan

China

Not much of a difference going on there, I know... that just shows how much was copied. There are other shots from Shinkai's work that better depict the copying, but all they do is prove how China didn't take the time to put in as much detail as Shinkai. I guess if it's successful, it's worth copying?

So let's get back to Gundam shall we? The basic jist of the story is China put up a Gundam statue, extremely similar to that of Japan's statue, at one of their amusement parks. People immediately stated "That's a rip off of Gundam! You can't do that! What the hell is going on?!" And so China says "NO. This is an original design! What's a Gundam?" Now I don't know what Bandai had to say about the topic and the kinda cool looking orange statue, but I'm sure whoever built the statue soon learned of the name Bandai.

So then overnight China removes the statue completely. Sometime after that reporters asked "Hey, what happened to your orange Gundam?" and China replied "Uhh... what statue? It never existed!" Better yet, just a couple days later lo and behold THIS THING APPEARED...

And so they pretty much used the same frame as before and created a "close enough to kinda look like Gundam but it's so different we won't get in trouble!" statue. The panels are different and it's grown spikes. The orange mobile suit looked cooler.

Cool beans China, cool beans.

-Jared C.