YMMV / RoboCop

Pages for invidual installments:

• RoboCop (1987)
• RoboCop 2
• RoboCop 3
• RoboCop: The Series
• RoboCop: Prime Directives
• RoboCop Versus The Terminator
• RoboCop (2014)
• RoboCop: Rogue City

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The film series as a whole provides examples of:

• Anvilicious: Drugs Are Bad and There Are No Good Executives. Frank Miller, Irvin Kershner and especially Paul Verhoeven are not aiming for subtlety here (in fact, Verhoeven has never even heard of such a concept). The movies gleefully raise Anviliciousness to an art form, bombarding the viewer with those two messages.
• Audience-Alienating Era: The attempts to aim the franchise towards children, RoboCop 3, RoboCop: The Series, and RoboCop: Alpha Commando, were not well-received by the fandom because of their exact purpose: toning down what'd been a very adult-set of films to little kids. Despite the attempts made by RoboCop: Prime Directives and the reboot, the franchise hasn't recovered.
• Awesome Music: The main theme is a suitable precursor to Klendathu Drop.
• Complete Monster: Now with a page.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The ED-209. Who's a cute widdle stupid Mecha Mook? Yes you are, yes you are! That nigh-unstoppable killing machine had a wide audience as a kids' toy.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: Paul Verhoeven states that Murphy / RoboCop was deliberately conceived as a Christ figure. He dies an incredibly torturous death, gets resurrected, walks on water, and is the people's only hope in this Crapsack World. Also, he kicks ass.
• First Installment Wins: RoboCop (1987) is an undisputed action/sci-fi classic, and set a benchmark that future Robocop media would struggle to meet.
• Friendly Fandoms: Despite being each others' biggest opponents when it comes to cross-media matchups, RoboCop and Terminator more or less share the same general audience. Unsurprisingly, this also extends to fellow Science Fiction-Horror franchises Alien and Predator which were both at their apex around the same time RoboCop and Terminator first got started. While Robocop is the least associated with the horror genre than the other three, Robocop enjoys fandom benefits from many a horror fan as well.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: RoboCop was particularly popular in Korea and the character was used as a corporate mascot to promote everything from TVs to frozen chicken.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Robocop depicted a futuristic Detroit as a bankrupt, crime-ridden city. Sadly, since this movie has come out, present day Detroit has become bankrupt and overrun by crime. In addition, the city has increasingly started to rely more on private security services as their number of police officers dwindle.
• Iron Woobie: Murphy is a nearly literal example. He techincally died, ended up in a state most people would consider an And I Must Scream, and ended up losing his relationship with his wife and son. As if this weren't enough, his bestie Lewis dies in the 3rd movie. Despite this, he hardly ever complains.
• Memetic Mutation: Robert Cop◊, an infamous bootleg Robocop toy.
• Misaimed Fandom: Blogger Supergay Detroit argued that a Robocop Statue built in Detroit by the residents would be "insulting to Detroit and to Detroiters who have lived here through the worst. The reason Detroit is the setting for Robocop is because the city is considered a hellhole. Robocop may be a man/machine who overcomes injustice, but the Detroit in that movie is no complimentinvoked. The statue would serve as a perpetual reminder that Detroit holds the distinction of being the most believable dystopia in America."
• Misblamed: Frank Miller for the second and third movies. His name may be in the credits, but his scripts did suffer a severe amount of Executive Meddling.
• Nightmare Fuel: Here.
• Sequelitis: Robocop 3. While not as bad as Robocop 3, the remake was widely agreed to not be up to the standard of the original.
• Special Effects Failure: People are split on the 'Go-Motion' animation of non-RoboCop robots (ED-209, RoboCain and the prototype robots at the beginning of film two). To some, they only look real whenever they remain still, but look clunky when they start to movie. But to others, this is justified because of their robotic nature.
  • For a more straighter example; the shot of Dick Jones being blown out the window and falling to his death. The sheer chintzy look almost ruins the (otherwise awesome) climax of the movie.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Children everywhere loved RoboCop as much as their parents did, even though the black comedy and political satire went over their heads; they just saw him as a cool superhero who fights bad guys. Apparently their parents didn't notice that all the hyper-violence, gore, sexual themes and depictions of hard drug use might not be appropriate for children, judging by the number of people today who saw it at that age when it first came out.

The Alpha Commando cartoon series provides examples of:

• Audience-Alienating Era: Given it's a children cartoon and Murphy being portrayed in a manner akin to Inspector Gadget, it really didn't help the state of the franchise following RoboCop 3 and RoboCop: The Series.
• Complete Monster: Mr. Brink is the leader of DARC (Directorate for Anarchy, Revenge, and Chaos), a terrorist organization that serves as the primary threat of the series. In the three part pilot, Justice Reborn, he instructs DARC to assassinate the premiere of Naugmenastan to cause a war so they can sell weapons to the country, eventually deciding to bomb the room the premiere is in and kill everyone. His organization continues to commit atrocities throughout the series, including converting Francesca Alliata into a cyborg slave to make her bomb a city; attempting to nuke all of the world's capitals; and trying to destroy a plane filled with the Goodwill ambassadors from the Asian Alliance nations, which would cause the Asian Alliance to declare war on the world, allowing DARC to sell weapons to the highest bidders. In the Family Reunion two part episode, Brink sends robots to take over New Detroit, and kidnaps Robocop's family, threatening to kill them if he tries to stop him. Though Brink himself is not seen again, his organization continues to perform evil actions, such as trying to destroy the world's landmarks with a laser, and supplying a corrupt gentleman with a detonator that will allow him to destroy a ship.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: In spite of the cartoon’s general lack of quality, David Sobolov turns in a great and sincere performance as Robocop, managing to capture the character’s basic humanity.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Despite being an animated series for families, at least one episode contains Body Horror and a moment of literal Scenery Porn.

The DataEast Arcade Games contain examples of:

• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: For some inexplicable reason, the 1988 arcade game was the highest-grossing game in 1988 Hong Kong, besides reaching second place in Japan's monthly Game Machine ranking charts.
• Porting Disaster: The DOS release of the 1988 arcade game was notably much poorer quality, featuring significantly reduced color palettes, less animations (notably, RoboCop never drew or holstered his gun), hit detection issues, a significantly limited soundtrack, and grenades that would reverse course to keep rolling toward you if they were jumped over.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: While the 1988 arcade game belongs on the other page, the same cannot be said about the multi-console 2003 video game. The game is frustrating to play, suffers from sluggish controls and it is possible to be killed in one hit by a small explosion. RoboCop himself can also sometimes be out of character with his one-liners. The game was met with negative reception and served as the finishing blow for Titus Software.

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