Robert Wadlow Nationality American Physical specifications Height 2.72 m Weight 222 kg
Much more than André, the huge one from «The Princess Bride»? Any less than Jack sees himself planting a magic bean? The truth is that the Big Green continues to see us from a very high place, knowing that he is about to turn 84 years old. But if it weren’t for an extreme transformation and a spectacular development, he might never have found his place on our retinas. He was recently chosen as one of the 3 most recognized advertising icons by the world public in the 20th century, after Ronald MacDonald and the Marlboro man; and since 1928, the year of his creation, he casts his shadow over the fields of the American Midwest. But how long does this shade last? The character Green Giant was born in 1925 as a publicity coup to introduce a larger and also more 12-year-old to the Minnesota Valley Canning Company, a canned vegetable company established in Le Sueur, Minnesota, and now also part of General Mills, a fifth brand of food on the planet. Over time, recognition of this character came to control the company’s entire line of merchandise, and in 1950 the brand officially changed its name to «Enorme Verde.» But his beginnings as a propaganda titan were not simple. After being born, the enormous green suffered a common pathology among the colossals: he was scary. He was initially drawn scowling and precisely wild, wearing a unkempt bearskin that made him look much more of a rural Incredible Hulk than the old gardener in a bean-leaf dress we all know today. Naturally, by the time he started in a television commercial in 1959, Big Green didn’t make the splash it was supposed to. It was played by a puppet with green rubber skin, which looked much more like a Godzilla with a zorrilla smile and which swayed to the sound of the characteristic music of colossal tales, with which the little ones, much more than hungry, hid in the shelter of precipitation. The biggest hurdle his developers encountered was how to teach Big Green, smiling or not. Proto-animation tricks were tried, an army of muscle-bound guys were painted green to see if they would stick around. They even resorted to showing only the feet. No matter what was procured, it all came out much more like Frankenstein than a huge gentile. So he went to the creative group and the new one decided to publish a big bang. The hunched position of the colossals was improved, their scowl replaced with a bright smile, and the pretty costumes were altered by an actor who sprayed himself with green paint to give him much closer looks, dressed in very elegant clothes, a suit of leaves pale. much greener than the skins of the condemned animals in the trunk of memories. They also added the word «Jolly» to the name to make it that much sweeter («Jolly Green Giant»). And most importantly, it was shot in height, so that it would stand out in his new environment: a paradisiacal valley full of plantations that would put into vision the new heights of this enormous good-natured man. The height changed according to taste; the creatives chose to play with the enormous size that appeared in certain advertisements, where the orchards looked like matchboxes and even touched the moon; but other advertisements also shrunk him so that he could (if necessary) go down to chat with the farmers or the countesses, face to face and without them running off like crazy. Finally, it occurred to them to add the much happier exclamations that are known: «Ho, Ho, Ho» from Santa Claus to carry out the trick. Len Dresslar lent his baritone voice and the ogre became America’s favorite mascot. However, it would not be until 1978 when the heyday of the Enorme Verde was finally defined in the collective imagination. It was his birthplace that marked him for posterity, when the town of Blue Earth, Minnesota (home to «The Valley,» which proclaims the motto) paid $43,000 at the time to erect a fiberglass sculpture glass.17 2-meter glass of the Jolly Green Giant in appreciation of all he accomplished for them, which also served to open the interchange on the east and west sides of Interstate 90. The sculpture was permanently erected on July 6, 1979 and today it attracts 10,000 visitors. a year, which can be portrayed between the feet of him. It was the brainchild of a local radio host, KBEW’s Paul Hedberg, who was doing a show that summer called «Welcome Passengers,» where he interviewed passengers who stopped at Blue Earth on their way to the interstate. At the end of each interview, Hedberg offered guests a can of corn and peas, which he received as a promotion from the local factory installed in the town. A common theme that ran through these interviews was the desire of tourists to «see the Big Green in full size.» In 1977, Hedberg contacted Thomas H. Wyman, president of Green Giant, to see if the company would leave behind a sculpture of its corporate symbol. Wyman gave his permission on the condition that the funds for the venture be raised locally. Hedberg approached ten businessmen from the region with the initiative and asked each of them for US$5,000: by the following week they had now donated the precise US$50,000 and the huge one managed to climb up to 17 meters high, in order to that it could be seen by each and every visitor along the longest interstate highway in the USA. Sources: Green Giant, Road Side America and Wikipedia Photos: Flickr
With a height of more than six feet and a weight of up to one and a half tons, it is the largest class of ammonite ever discovered.
Ammonites are a class of extinct cephalopods that inhabited the Earth 400 million years ago. Popularly popular for their flat, spiral-like shells, they belong to the most popular and studied fossils of prehistoric animals, which let us know much more about life in our world tens and tens of millions of years ago.
Despite the rigorous fossil record, there are still some unknowns about the evolution and ecology of these marine animals: apart from the secret about their soft parts and the rest of their organism beyond the shell, a huge specimen was revealed in 1895 in northwestern Germany, It aroused the curiosity of generations of paleontologists thanks to its size.
Why should we protect them? Learn much more about these giants:
1. Harmless colossals. Although they can measure 8 meters and weigh much more than 1,000 kilograms, they are not a threat to humans, since unlike other species of rays, their sting does not contain venom.
The “Enormous of Castelnau”
There is another case, this time of bone extracts -not finished skeletons- found in France. They are a humerus, a tibia and a femoral bone found by the anthropologist Georges Vacher de Lapouge.
According to the scholar, these remains belonged to an individual measuring 3.50 meters! Humans have the possibility of having lived in the Neolithic.