George Geekish doesn’t support the militarization of the US police as a matter of policy, but he isn’t above profiting from it in a professional capacity. Because his profession is that of a B-movie prop guy, and there just isn’t a whole lot of stuff you can afford to be above in that line of work.
But for this joke to work, I guess the production company must still be American, even if the story is set in Canada?
And…if the tanks are real, I guess the Gigantor would need to be full-size and functional, as well. O_o; And I doubt George could have gotten that from US Army overstock. Perhaps he registered the company as a police department in Japan, as well? But that would probably have required vastly more paperwork than in the US, based on the reputation of Japanese bureaucracy. And Japanese people tend to know their country, so George could probably not have gotten away with simply making up some place name. The US Army readily believed him that he was the Sheriff of Potemkinville, Missichusetts”, but that would have been hard to pull off in Japan.
Also, it’s possible that even the Japanese SDF doesn’t actually operate full-size Gigantors.
I guess I should have considered the implications and consequences better when coming up with this gag…
More on Monday.
I get a noggin feeling this cut didn’t get in the final film anyway.
I think the proper question would be not “Where did Nolan got real tanks from?”, but “Where did Nolan got a 1:1 model of Tetsujin 28 from?”
Nevermind the first part of my message, I found this image.
A functioning model at that, that would be the hard part. There actually is a full-scale (59 ft) statue of Tetusjin 28 in a park in Kobe. You can see it on Google Maps. It was erected to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the earthquake of 1995…not sure why, though. Quite obviously, he didn’t manage to prevent it…
That’s not very surprising, Japanese love their super robots. And this one is the first one, the one that started the whole genre.