Is he a keeper or an eyesore?
There are people around town who want to know whether the towering muscleman statue outside Village Cinemas in Sunshine, known locally as Millennium Man, should be restored to his former glory … or left to rot.
Sunshine Short Film Festival chairman and Sunshine Business Association member Bruce White said feedback over the next month will reveal how much love there is in the community for Millennium Man.
“We need to see if there’s enough support to keep the statue,” he said.
If it is able to garner enough interest from the community, he said the SBA would contact Big Fish workshop in Footscray, where the statue was made in the late 1990s, to find out how much it would cost to repair his fibreglass shell and internal lights.
“If we get enough people involved, we’ll commission small polyresin statuettes and give them away to people who make a donation,” he said.
“I think this is very important the community supports it, so they have ownership of it. We will lose it if we’re not careful.”
Big Fish partner Renata Slusarski said it would be a significant cost to restore the statue.
“It was only built to last about five years, but he’s been sitting out there for about 20 years now,” she said, adding that Village Cinemas commissioned the sculpture for a marketing campaign. The figure is lifting a globe that has a reel of film wrapped around it, representing movies being broadcast across the world.
If the plan goes ahead, donations will be accepted and statuettes gifted in return during Sunshine Short Film Festival in late October.
This year’s film festival winners will also get a Millennium Man trophy.
