Among the many horrors sloughed off Squid Game’s leviathan cultural presence—babies wearing the costumes of damned contestants, a truly absurd NFT scam, kids playing playground games on playgrounds again—the most innocuous but hilariously threatening of them all may be the temporary installation of the show’s little girl murder robot in Sydney, Australia.
The giant, laser-eyed doll from the first round of the show’s death tournament, “Red Light, Green Light,” was recreated for an interactive art piece that appeared at the city’s 4 Circular Quay West. PerthNow writes that the doll “weighs in at three tonnes,” stands 4.5 meters (just under 15 feet) tall, and “can turn its head, [chant] “red light, green light,” and has motion-detecting eyes to eliminate players who get caught.”
The statue showed up last week and is being removed today, but, while it was still around, allowed players to play a version of the game that didn’t end with them being shot to death and dying slowly in the bowels of a nightmare island fortress.
An Instagram post displaying the doll explains that players 16 and older could come to the site, “check in using [a] QR code and show your COVID-19 digital certificate” and then play the start-stop game while “[respecting] social distancing (1 person per 2 square metres) at all times.”
Unlike the show, the post stressed that everyone should “play safe” and qualified its statement that “anyone caught disobeying the rules will be eliminated” by clarifying that this means they’d be “asked to leave” rather than executed in cold blood.
A Global News segment recorded the quay crowded with people yesterday, celebrating Halloween by showing up to take part in and have their photographs taken with costumed guards who pretend to choke them to death. (As one man talks, a kid wearing a guard mask points a toy gun at the back of his head the entire time.)
Fortunately, at no point in the statue’s residency did Sydney’s wealthy elite decide to turn on the robot and eliminate a portion of the people gathered to check out the doll. That use, we have to assume, is being saved for next October.
(Source and courtesy: https://www.avclub.com/news)