Rocky Balboa has a statue in Philadelphia, and RoboCop one in Detroit. So of course Darth Vader has a statue in—Odessa, Ukraine?
Not to be outdone by Reykjavík—where a street is named after the Dark Lord of the Sith—according to The Hollywood Reporter, a monument to one of the silver screen’s all-time greatest villains has been unveiled in the Ukraine. The Vader statue is actually a converted Vladimir Lenin statue, which was to be demolished under a recent law banning Communist symbols in the country. (There are apparently no laws against symbols of the Galactic Empire.) Residents contended that the statute should remain in one form or another, so artist and designer Aleksander Milov stepped in.
The statue is truly a sight, so don’t hold the fact that Milov attended Burning Man this year against him. Milov “hopes the monument will become one of Odessa’s tourist attractions;” people do love running up those Rocky stairs, but let’s hope fans of the Dark Side don’t start going around choking people who think their devotion to that ancient religion is quite sad. Unfortunately, the Darth Vader statue cannot be considered canon, as it was in fact a statue of Emperor Palpatine that was erected on Coruscant.
Darth Vader now resides on the grounds of a factory in the Black Sea port city, and should stand tall there for a while: The statue has a wi-fi hotspot installed in its head, and finding reliable wi-fi can be harder than tracking down stolen Death Star plans. George Lucas, presumably, is currently working with Rick McCallum to make the statue look more like Hayden Christensen.