According to a pervasive Las Vegas myth, the oral cavity of the old MGM Grand lion served as the casino hotel’s entrance. Even the Joseph Pulitzer Prize-winning Las Vegas Sun described the pilot MGM Grand entrance inward Mar 2001 as “A vast king of beasts caput with its lawless oral cavity serving as the doorway.” As you canful insure from the photo below, this just now wasn’t true.

The lion’s rima oris myth is to a greater extent explainable than most this series has busted. That’s because it was in reality circulated past the hotel’s corporate owners, and then repeated o'er the ensuing decades by journalists who didn’t bother fact-checking. MGM Grand CEO Terry Lanni – who took o'er when the cassino hotel was deuce years old inwards 1995 – often cited the lion’s-mouth entranceway as a meridian object lesson of the loser of corporations to commit proper thoughtfulness to ethnical sensitivities.

It has been widely reported that many Chinese gamblers believe that traveling anyplace through a internal representation of a lion’s oral cavity invites unfit fortune – non nearly as often speculative fortune as traveling through and through an existent lion’s mouth, presumably. But enough.

It wasn’t literally true (that they entered through and through the lion’s mouth),” former MGM Mirage executive spokesperson Alan Feldman told Casino.org. “But many customers believed it to get the same disconfirming vibes, and refused to usage that entrance.”

In 2014, Casino.org’s own Sir Walter Scott Roeben published a “Vital Vegas” blog listing eight fascinating Chinese gaming superstitions that Las Vegas casinos heed to seek to please their high-rollers from China. These superstitions explicate why, for instance, both the Rio and Encore gambling casino hotels are alone missing floors 40-49. The list 4 is considered unlucky because it sounds like the Chinese word for death.

Lion inwards Wait

Lanni replaced the Panthera leo with the stream ace in 1998. It was sculpted past Hermann Snellen Maurice Johnson, a convicted con adult male who changed the class of his life by seemly an artist. Reportedly the second-largest bronzy statue inward the domain – after a Hong Kong Buddha that stands 90 feet – Johnson’s golden bronze-polished social lion stands 45 feet, weighs 50 tons, and sits atop a 25-foot pedestal.

Oh, and its make is not Leo. Lion was the gens of the original MGM Grand lion, after the 1 who roars at the come out of all MGM films. (Actually, there were 11 different picture Leos, and the original I was named Slats. But let’s joystick to busting ace king of beasts myth at a time.)

Today’s MGM Grand Panthera leo is called, simply, Grand Lion.

In increase to switching lions, Lanni ditched the MGM Grand’s original Wizard of Oz-themed expanse and misguided amusement park, replaced several restaurants, and built the Mansion, a radical of 29 severally designed Mediterranean-themed residences.

Feldman did country another understanding the pilot MGM Grand Panthera leo had to go, by the way of life – one based on a to a greater extent sure fact.

“It was also ugly,” he said.

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