Nerding Day: RoboCop: The Animated Series🌭 (Patreon)

Let me take you back to the year 1988. If you don’t remember, good news: I’m right there with you. I don’t really, either. I was four years old, at best. Some of that year I was only three and a half, and we all know how that can feel. So, if you ask me to tell you about 1988 - and I’m as surprised as anyone that you did - I’m mostly going to go off things I saw in the early ‘90s when people were inexplicably already nostalgic for the prior decade.

But here’s what I assume 1988 was like: Ronald Reagan said the phrase “it’s morning in America,” which made a bunch of finance guys do cocaine and murder, then George Bush got elected, and everything was better because suburban neighborhoods were filmed at a lower resolution and cartoons based on popular R-Rated intellectual properties were on television with the sole purpose of selling low-quality toys at top dollar prices.

And one such R-Rated intellectual property was a little something called RoboCop. He’s half robot, half man, all PIG!!!! No, I’m kidding. He’s all cop. If he were all pig, who knows what sort of film that would be. Huh. Wait. Let me write that down. Where’s my pen? Here we go. R-o-b-o, P-i-g. Okay, I’ve got it down. I’m gonna add an asterisk next to that so I remember it’s important. Where were we? Right!

RoboCop is a movie directed by Paul Verhoeven who’s famous for his biting, satirical sci-fi action films as well as being one of many directors whom I have to Google to make sure I’m spelling their name right. Paul Verhoeven’s movies often use sci-fi as a way to criticize capitalism and the over militarization of our culture. Fortunately, he does that by blowing shit away and killing people with these gnarly fucking bug monsters and having hot chicks with three titties out, so everyone takes away the messages as intended. Nobody has ever misunderstood any of his imagery nor misused it in a way one would call “counterproductive.”

In the movie RoboCop, a nice, everyday, mom and pop, meat and potatoes police officer named Alex Murphy is killed for a variety of reasons that I don’t need to get into. Since this movie takes place in a near-future city called New Detroit and a monopolistic corporation with the creative name OmniCorp owns said city, the police work with engineers to create the perfect police officer: A severely wounded man with cybernetic attachments that cause him to move extremely slow and turn like that trash can droid in Star Wars. But he’s a first draft, so what can you do?

This is a very violent movie. We see Alex Murphy die and he dies bad. We see a lot of people die and they die bad. I remember nearly puking the first time I saw it when a guy rotting from being covered in radioactive waste explodes after a car drives through him. True, I was a kid, but still. I never wanted to puke that much during a movie again until Rise of Skywalker, ayooooo! RoboCop is a fun movie, but it’s insanely violent and sexual. There’s hussies everywhere! Bitches are asked to leave! It’s entirely tits and violence but, of course, of course, as a metaphor for capitalism and all that.

Anyway, they took that and turned it into a cartoon in 1988. And it’s fascinating because RoboCop: The Animated Series feels like a cartoon they’d put out in the live-action RoboCop world. “Let’s ease children into the ultra violence that makes up our society today.” Unlike animated adaptations like Ace Ventura, RoboCop doesn’t shy from some sleazier angles of the source material. No. It’s still very horny, it’s still very violent, and it’s still very fucked up. Just, you know, for kids. Do people still explode? All the time! More so than before! You just don’t see the body parts. But, seriously, like half of the show is police officers’ bodies being thrown blocks away during a big explosion. Those guys are dead, son.

RoboCop: The Animated Series still takes place in New Detroit, but maybe a little further into the future. I say that because everything is the exact same but the guns fire lasers rather than bullets. That’s really the only big concession this show gives to that one fucking S&P guy we’ve all had to deal with who has an issue with anything you put in an episode. Lasers, not bullets. Still violent, but at least it’s also causing third degree burns while still severing your femoral artery. There is also no more out and out gore, but the body count is still pretty crazy. Like, a lot of people die in this show if you just follow the action. But, you know what? A lot of people also learn about friendship and having fun.

In the cartoon, RoboCop is still massacred and rebuilt by OmniCorp and the New Detroit police department. He’s also still paired with Anne Lewis as a potential love interest. In the movie, this is kind of just hinted at a bit since Alex Murphy had a wife and kid before he “died” and they think he’s still “dead” so it’s a little “awkward.” In the show, RoboCop clearly wants what Anne is selling. He even gets routinely jealous of her. For example, in one episode she’s asked for her hand in marriage by a Middle Eastern prince who was just saved by RoboCop during international peace negotiations (as happens in New Detroit). RoboCop is weird about it, asking Anne if she really wants to become a wealthy princess instead of a police officer in the worst city in America. Fortunately, Anne calls it off because the Middle Eastern prince has a bunch of wives already. Yeah. I’m as disappointed as you in this stereotype happening in 1988. As an ally, I try to call out problematic moments from long dead shows as much as I can.

Unlike the movie, RoboCop is not sure how it feels about anything. Capitalism is bad or good depending on the episode. Sometimes OmniCorp does the right thing! Sometimes it does the wrong thing! Sometimes they love RoboCop! Sometimes they’re trying to replace him with ED-209! Or sending him out to fight ED-209s that were bought by a foreign government or something. Honestly, now that I think about it, this is a more realistic depiction of an evil corporation. It’s just an ouroboros of ass fucking. There’s one old guy who makes all the decisions but isn’t really clear on what the fuck he wants either. There’s also a guy named Dr. McNamara who’s a cyborg himself and hates RoboCop. Does any of this matter? No. The show was canceled after only one season, its unmade last episode’s budget being spent on an early pilot for X-Men.

The OmniCorp part is especially weird because one of his closest allies is a doctor / engineer / scientist who repairs him. She’s very pretty and argues with Anne a lot and oooooo, baby, is there tension about who cares about RoboCop! I’d kiss her if she asked me, but she probably won’t. Not after reading this, at least! God, I’m an idiot. I shouldn’t have even said anything. Man, I bet I’m older now than her character was in the show. That’s a big kick in the ass.

OmniCorp both consistently pays for and repairs RoboCop while employing other people that try to kill RoboCop. You won’t believe this, you better sit down: The New Detroit police are the same. Every single episode, the other cops treat RoboCop like shit and then he saves them and they’re like, “Ayyyy! You’re alright, buddy!” and then it goes back to the same thing in the next one. There’s one wild story where the police force basically hires a team of all-human super athletes or something to replace RoboCop and each one is picked off so easily it’s almost pathetic. They don’t die because they’re handsome and probably meant to be toys if their characters ever took off. But they do say a variation on, “Ayyyy! You’re alright buddy!”

Literally each and every episode pivots on hating and not trusting RoboCop. It’s almost sad. It’s like if the X-Men all worked in an office where people said, “Fuck you” every time they walked by for coffee. There’s an entire episode dedicated to a news network editing together misleading footage of RoboCop because turning the public against him was good for ratings. RoboCop saves the journalist, who then once more edits the footage to make it seem like RoboCop almost got him killed. Another (ethical! not like video game reviewers!!!!!) journalist clears RoboCop’s name, but it’s still a weird episode. They’re all weird episodes, I mean. RoboCop also fights an electricity-eating kaiju, so there’s that. Do any of the police or public trust him? Not in that one, they don’t! He beats a fucking kaiju that was swallowing everyone’s laser blasts, but they still won’t give him respect.

Even RoboCop doesn’t know how to feel about RoboCop. In the movie, RoboCop was a machine whose buried humanity sometimes came to the surface in shocking, emotional moments. In the show, RoboCop feels like a guy who’s supposed to be a costumed mascot called “RoboCop” and keeps breaking character. He laughs. He smiles a lot, but then denies he’s smiling. He gets a cold. I mean, there’s some value in the idea of a cyborg’s resistance to biological viruses, but it’s really just - you know - he almost ruins a mission by sneezing. Then again, there’s a moment when he almost executes Clarence Boddicker before getting talked out of it. So… Not a lot of consistency. Or, if you want a narrative wraparound, it feels like this RoboCop is far, far more unstable than the one in the movie. I’m gonna go with that in my head. Cool.

You can just feel the show’s writers and producers stretching to find something interesting to say with RoboCop. I mean, it does say things: Don’t trust corporations, or the police, or the media. And those are all very, very valid points. But God this is a show struggling to figure out what to do with its central character. Which is odd! Because there is a lot! But every moment you can just hear notes like, “Why is he so dour?” and “Can’t he maybe go to a party?” and “He eats soup, right?” Which he does. RoboCop eats soup in this show. You might’ve been wondering. RoboCop as a superhero makes sense in a theoretical way, but his origin story is “What if Thomas Wayne was killed in Crime Alley, but he became Batman?” It’s hard to translate trauma and murder to kids shows, even if everybody only dies in big explosions that throw their bodies everywhere.

That all said, there’s one weird moment that I have to assume must be a weird anti-Reagan joke. They pass by a sign into some trash nowhere slum that reads, “Entering Trickle Down Town Industrial Park.” If that is an anti-Reagan joke? I respect that. And I even understand it!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Yvonne Clapham, who makes the bowl of soup OmniCorp uses to verify RoboCop remains legally human.

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