Staying in hotel in Chiang Mai, Thailand for a couple of days. It’s near a new little open air mall, which inexplicably has a bit of a Maritime theme going on (for the uninformed, Chiang Mai is literally hundreds of kilometers from the ocean). Walking around, one also cannot help but to notice various statues of figures from mythology – western and otherwise. But just in case this isn’t random enough, my family and I rounded one corner and found ourselves looking at this:
I apologize for the low quality images, but they are off my phone and that’s what we’re working with.
That’s right, it’s a Superman statue. Brandon Routh (Superman Returns) style. In an English-style phone booth. Complete with a cloth cape.
This mall area is new. Could this statue be new? Is Brandon Routh still the standard model for Superman, even seven years after his forgettable and disappointing film came out? Or is this left over from something.
Modern mythology? I’m not sure. But as if that wasn’t odd enough, I later spotted this:
See it? It’s your friendly, neighborhood Spider-Man, lurking over Chiang Mai. I’m not as savvy with my Spider-Man designs, so I don’t know if I’m looking at something from Tobey Mag uire’s day or the more recent Andrew Garfield. Or neither.
But perhaps the strangest thing I saw, even more so than the non-pictured, incongruous, near-naked statues of various figures out of Greek mythology, was this:
It’s Marilyn Monroe, ostensibly from The Seven Year Itch.
But it is by far the creepiest, ugliest rendition of Marilyn Monroe I’ve ever seen.