I WORK FOR DICK JONES! DICK JONES!!!!
I’m suffering from Con fatigue. I’ve only slept about 8 hours in the last two days. From recapping Con news, to my day job, I almost forgot one of the most important anniversary in movies was today. Ladies and gentlemen, THE seminal classic of violence and satire turns 25 today. Yes, Robocop is 25.
I could write some soliloquies about how well this film holds up a quarter century later. How Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner wrote one of the most intriguing and engaging scripts for something that should have been shlock. How Paul Verhoeven made himself a name with this first American film. How Peter Weller brought a performance to a robot that mixed unstoppable bad ass with soul. Or how Ronny Cox and Kurtwood Smith managed to create two of the most memorable villains in film history. How about Basil Poledouris crafted a score comparable to John William’s Indiana Jones in epicness.
Instead, I’m going to gush for a moment, and show a bunch of clips.
Fuck I love Robocop. I saw it when it would run on KTLA 5 out here in Southern California as a kid. As a boy, I loved all things dinosaurs and robots. So, in it’s edited for TV format, I watched Robocop for the first time when I was 5 years old. Ruined forever I was. Like some sort of cocaine kick for children, Robocop clicked something in the quasars of my brain. They exploded into a billion pieces, effectively changing my psyche from innocent child to a lover of violence. Enough that upon it’s released, I begged my dad to take me to see Robocop 2. Which, like a loving father, did for his 6 year old son.
Grown up now, I love it on a whole other level. Kurtwood Smith, the loving but gruff father from That 70′s Show is only rivaled by his performance as Clarence Boddicker. A perfect, cocky, motherfucker. Who else could rock a sash and be a crime lord who playfully killed a cop. His utterance of the term “Bitches Leave” is forever part of my vocabulary.
Peter Weller’s Robocop is forever a force. A corporate monster that overcomes his walking logo status to regain a piece of his humanity and use his condition to continue to be the best goddamn cop Old Detroit has. Fluid it moment, Weller defined Robocop in ways no one else could, and in ways I think that even the new movie will be unable to.
And that SCORE! Sweet Xenu’s purple nipples. Every time I hear that theme I feel pumped in a way I can only imagine that the most hardcore Star Wars fan feels.
Robocop to me is one of a handful of films I consider “PERFECT”. Evey scene is intricate to the plot. All 102 minutes are crucial, and if one second were to be lost, the flow of the film would be altered, and thus, ruined. I’ve seen Robocop about 90 times at least. My DNA is written with this film in it’s structure. I’m fairly certain that when I die, my last wishes will be to have this theme played at my wake, and to be frozen until some sort of OCP type group could bring me back ala Alex Murphy.
