Wednesday Ramble: Robocop Tooooooo

Last week I talked about how I almost got to see Robocop. Here's the real deal.

Now where was I? Oh yeah. So I'm sitting there, all alone in the dark, watching Robocop. My short 11 years on the planet suddenly meant nothing. This was the apex of my life and I knew it. At the first sign of gore (a hapless executive getting shredded by ED-209), the realization that my disastrous swimming lesson freakout that prevented me from seeing the best film ever made WITH MY MOTHER was a blessing in disguise. I knew that my mom would have flipped out and I wouldn't see Robocop until I went off to college. (If only my Space Mountain spaz-out had some secret happy outcome. (All that really accomplished was making my parents ashamed to call me their son. (But that's another story.)))

And little did I know at the time, this was the cut version:



When the film was over, my mind was swarming. I couldn't calm down. You'd think that I had snorted about 50 lines from that coke factory Robocop busted. I went down to the arcade with a fistful of quarters and played Rolling Thunder until I was broke. Once my parents were done with their conferences for the day, I chewed their ears off about Robocop. I couldn't shut up about it. However, I was very careful not to mention anything about people getting shot in the privates, their hands blown off, stabbed in the jugular, shot in the kneecaps, etc. I did mention the toxic waste bit. How could I resist grossing my mom out by detailing a scene where a man is dipped in toxic chemicals and then explodes when he gets hit by a car? I just couldn't.





When you just couldn't enough Robocop (and believe me I just couldn't), then you just had to check out Marvel's comic adaptation of the film. It is seriously one of the worst fucking comic books ever made. Obviously, all of the cursing is absent, as is the extreme gore. The worst part, of course, is the terrible artwork. Certain scenes from the film are drawn pretty good, the rest of it is just awkward and lackluster bordering on pitiable. This lame garbage put me off so much that I didn't even know there was an actual Robocop comic book with its own storyline. I'm assuming it sucked too.

The following Christmas, after I thought I had opened all of my presents, I noticed that there was one for me left unopened. Judging by the shape and the weight, it was definitely a VHS tape. When I peeled off that paper, you could have knocked me over with a feather. It was Robocop! I owned very few movies in those days and my parents (unless they watched it without my knowledge) had just given me the most ultraviolent thing I'd ever seen.

I think I've watched Robocop somewhere between 20 or 25 times thanks mostly to that tape. This was one of the very rare films that I could actually watch twice in a row. I prided myself on knowing every line of dialogue by heart. (Yeah, that's one useless talent I no longer possess.) Unlike the comic book apaptation, I found the network TV version quite amusing with all the curse words replaced and jarring editing to cover up the violence, so I usually watched it when it was on. Obsessive behavior is so much easier when you're a kid. No one's keeping track of your free time.



When the trailers for Robocop 2 started popping up on TV, I couldn't contain my excitement. I actually started writing my own novelization of what I thought Robocop 2 was going to be about just based on what I gleaned off the trailers. I don't remember how far I got or what the exact plot was of my little fan fiction but I was 14 so I imagine it was pretty friggin' dumb and hilarious. Or maybe just pathetic.

I have a vague memory of my mom taking me to the theater to see Robocop 2. I know she just bought me a ticket and dropped me off. I'm glad she didn't come with me to see the film because there were several things about this awesome sequel that would have probably caused her to bolt with me in tow. For instance, there's that kid, Hob (played by Gabriel Damon), a drug pushing, murderous psychopath, who was my freakin' hero. My mom would have noticed the obvious glee and admiration on my face during scenes of him blowing people away and cursing up a storm and it all would have been over.

Even then I knew the sequel wasn't as good as the original but I was more than pleased. The things that I loved about the first film were even more pronounced here. The urban decay, fake commercials and newscasts, the cartoonish levels of violence, etc. It was all there. A bad guy like Cain (played by the terrifying Tom Noonan) made me forget all about Clarence Boddicker. Of course. Seeing Dan O'Herlihy in a hot tub... that wasn't so good.

So aparently, the Robocop phenomenon continued without me. When I heard they were making Robocop 3, I had only two rules: it had to be rated R and it had to have Peter Weller. Well, they screwed that up and did neither of those things. No disrespect to Robert John Burke but dude ain't Robocop. I will never accept him. Of course, the PG-13 was the final nail in the coffin of my interest. I was a dickish 16 year old at this point so there was no way I was going to waste my precious (yeah right) time on this crap.

Then there was a TV series which I didn't even know about until the toys were available for purchase at Kay Bee Toys at the University Mall. This was in 2002 and the show had been off the air for 8 years. Another strange thing: Kay Bee never had the Robocop figure. It was always the supporting characters. Had they had at least one friggin' Robocop, I would have bought the dang thing. But wait, there's more. A mini-series? A Japanese rip-off? A slew of videogames? (No wait, that I remember.) A Frank Miller comic book? And now, word on the street is that a 3D Robocop might be in the works? I'd buy that for a dollar! You knew that was coming, didn't you?

I did pick up the DVD back in 2001 and had a tearful reunion with my Robobro. It was still an exhilarating film and I remembered so much dialogue from it that I annoyed everyone in the room (nothing new there) by telegraphing the best parts. But I haven't watched it since. I guess it's time to get reaquainted with an old friend. I probably need to get down with this unrated cut I keep hearing about.

Wednesday Ramble: Do Robocops Dream of Robosheep?

Robocop and Bladerunner are very similar films and I am going to make a list of how they are similar. 1) They both take place in a city. 2) They both take place in the future. Those are the only two I can think of right now. Well, that didn’t pan out. I guess I’ll just blab on and on about why Robocop is still one of my favorite movies of all time since it was released nearly 23 years ago. But first, I have to talk about how I almost got to see it in theaters.

The summer that Robocop came out, I was taking swimming lessons. I was nine years old and I did not yet know how to swim. It was for that reason (and partly because of Jaws) that I was scared of the deep end of the pool. However, unlike my breakdancing lessons from the previous summer, I was taking to swimming quite well. It was only a mildly humiliating experience. I was one of the older kids there (if not the oldest) so the learning process actually made me feel dumb because I should have already been swimming like a dang fish. So yeah, my mom promised me that she would take me to see Robocop if I passed the class.

Robocop was the hottest movie that summer. My friends had already seen it and had told me that it eclipsed the awesomeness of Transformers: The Movie. This was essential viewing and the promise of seeing it made me all the more determined to learn how to swim. On the last day of class, my mom stayed on the benches, watching, ready to pick me up, take me to lunch, and then whisk me off to the movie theater. My tenth birthday was just a few days away, I was going to see Robocop, and some 7 year old kid was playing with his snot in the pool. I was having the time of my life. That’s when the swimming instructor announced that our final test was to jump off the diving board into the deep end of the pool.

It was like a slap in the face. It dawned on me that in order to pass the class and get to see the movie event of the century, I had to risk drowning. Like, really drowning. I watched other kids (some of which were half my age) jump off the diving board and into the deep end. Each time they sank like a stone and my stomach seized up. Then they rose to the surface laughing and confidently swam to either the edge or the instructor waiting in case something went wrong. I was going to fucking die. I just knew it.

I immediately got out of the pool and went over to my mom and tried to talk her out of making me finish the class. She was not amused. I begged her not to make me jump into the deep end and explained that I knew how to swim so there was no reason for such a pointless act. She told me that if I didn’t jump off that diving board, she wouldn’t take me to see Robocop. I lost it. I wasn’t really a tantrum kind of a kid at this point. I never swung my arms around, banged my head on the ground, or squealed like a beast. I just shook and wept. I’m sure it looked like my dog had just died or something. I was in one of those impossible quandaries. I knew that crying wasn’t going to get me what I wanted. I knew that I was going to have to do the scary thing I had to do. I knew that by crying, I was making things worse but I couldn’t stop.

After five (or ten or twenty) failed attempts to get up the courage to jump into the deep end, I finally did it. Now granted, I was crying when I jumped in and I had the instructor catch me when I hit the water. And I came up choking and flailing like a drowning cat. Yet I rose from the pool triumphant and went over to my mother who was just staring at me. Smiling (and strangely proud), I said something to the effect of ‘see, I knew I could do it, now take me to Robocop’. She calmly said, ‘no’ and we left the pool. I don’t remember if we spoke on the way home or not. I probably tried to reason with her and failed. I didn’t get to see Robocop that day and I’m glad. I had proven myself to be a sniveling wussy coward and God only knows how I would have turned out if my mom had given in. So Robocop came and went. It was in theaters for what seemed like forever and I didn’t even try to convince my mom again to take me to see it. I had failed in my quest to grow up even a little bit that summer.

The following summer, my parents took me along to the Tupperware convention in Orlando, Florida. It was a week’s stay in a nice hotel (probably the Marriot) with a game room and a swimming pool (uh oh). The best part about the trip was that my parents would be in meetings all day and I would be free to roam around the place, read, draw, and waste some cash at the arcade. It was late afternoon when we checked in, hauled our bags upstairs, and went up to our room. Something caught my eye immediately: there was this little cardboard promotional thingie on top of the cable box showing the Pay Per View movies the hotel offered. At the top of the list was, that’s right, friggin’ Robocop. I danced a jig and showed my mom the good news. For a split second, I could see that she was remembering last summer’s Roboswimming misadventure. But she just smiled at my enthusiasm and said that I could watch it the next day while she and my dad were at their meetings.

The wait was agony. I had already waited a year to watch Robocop and now I had to wait one more night? Shit. I could barely sleep a wink that night. Of course, I had already wasted a third of my week’s videogame budget that evening (they had Space Harrier!) so my mind was already racing. But the promise of the single greatest film of all time waiting for me in the morning made it almost impossible to sleep. At six in the morning, I got up with my parents. I tried to help them get ready to pass the time. The next showing of Robocop was at 8:00am. My dad quickly re-explained how Pay Per View movies worked. Once I was done with the movie, I had to change the channel. If I left it on all day, we would have to pay an exorbitant fee when we checked out. Duh, like I didn't already know that. After a quick breakfast with my folks, they went on their way and I was finally alone. I shut the curtains, plunging the room in darkness, and watched some morning cartoons while keeping an eye on the clock. When it was finally time, I turned to the Pay Per View channel and there it was: ROBO FUCKIN’ COP!

To be continued next week...