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Hey Lewis, it’s supercop! This week on a special An Alan Smithee Podcast we look back on the Robocop trilogy. Few other trilogies of films intended as ongoing franchises ever experienced such a precipitous, virtually calculated drop in quality from one of the greatest films ever made (even Criterion agrees) to a definitively cynical rehash with official comic book credentials – Frank Miller, whose film career somehow outlasted the kid oriented director of PG-13 Part 3, Fred Dekker. Old wounds are opened as old e-hate mail from Dekker himself is disclosed for the first time!
NEXT WEEK: THE STRANGER (1946, ORSON WELLES) & JAY & SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK (2001, KEVIN SMITH)
I was about 13 when Robocop came out on VHS in the UK and I still remember the impact it had on my (male) classmates: if you hadn’t seen this and Aliens, and couldn’t quote lines from them, you weren’t “cool”. My parents didn’t let me watch 18-rated videos so I actually read Ed Naha’s novelisation so that I could pretend I’d seen it.
Just thinking about possible influences on the visual style of Robocop- I was a big 2000AD fan in the late eighties and I remember a lot of readers’ letters from the time complaining that Robocop had “ripped off” Judge Dredd’s character design. I have no idea if Judge Dredd really was an influence, I guess the mask is kind of similar, and the emotionless vocal delivery. Judge Dredd also has a dystopic urban setting of course. I don’t think you could push it further than that.
The Judge Dredd movie, now that really was a bad comic-book adaptation, the worst in my opinion. That and the Tank Girl movie really made me embarrassed to tell people I read the original comics.
Obviously I mean the 1995 Judge Dredd movie. I didn’t know there was a new one coming out until just now!
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