RoboCop

Back in the 80's, it was perfectly acceptable to adapt an extremely violent, R-Rated movie into a kid-friendly cartoon, and Robocop was no exception.

The stories couldn't carry over the violence so instead they relied on the whole "is he a man or a machine?" plot threads. While those aspects stories were done quite well, they were surrounded by simplistic "I wanna kill Robocop" plot lines that brought down the quality of the stories.

This show was a little more mature than shows like "Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends," but not quite at the level of "Batman: The Animated Series," which many of its writers and producers when on to.

Back in the '80s and before, you were allowed to see violent movies for adults.

Robocop was a movie you took your kids to see and we loved it. But that was before parents assumed that their kids were all idiots that couldn't distinguish between real l9ife and movies.

Now the assumption is that kids today are fragile and vulnerable and the slightest stimulation will destroy their psyche and leave them in a catatonic state.

That's what happens when you listen to psychologists.

Moving back to the '80s, Robocop was rater "R" and every kid wanted to see it, so parents took their children to the movies and it became a hit.

It became so much of a hit with kids that they made a cartoon out of it, because back then we could understand movies made for adults and enjoy them as much as we could dumb cartoons...save the obvious anti-privatization satire in the original Robocop film.

And the cartoon wasn't dumbed down. Robocop's origin story was left unchanged and even rehashed. The blood was significantly less, but the story of the police killing was the same.

And it didn't warp anyone.

The only thing was...we wanted Robocop and the cartoon was a little too cheap to stand up to the movie.

When it was released back in 1987, Robocop became a box office success, as not only did it tell a good tale about a cop who is rebuilt into a robot by a megacorporation after he is killed in the line of duty, and ends up hunting down the criminal gang who killed him, but it was also ultraviolent (so ultraviolent, that Orion Pictures had to edit the film to tone down the violence for the R rating, as it got an X rating 11 times). Somehow, this got Orion to team up with Marvel Productions (the company responsible for hit shows like the original Muppet Babies cartoon, The Transformers, and the first G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero cartoon) to take this ultraviolent film and make it into a TV show aimed at kids (and this was two years after Ruby-Spears treaded such waters with Rambo: The Forces of Freedom, which was based on First Blood and its sequel, Rambo: First Blood Part II, which lasted only one season with 65 episodes).

Set after the events of the film, RoboCop is an animated series that shows the further adventures of Alex Murphey, a.k.a. RoboCop, and his partner, Ann Lewis, as they uphold the law of Old Detroit while making sure the cyborg policeman is still reliable in the eyes of OCP, as a new villain, Dr. McNamara, an OCP scientist who has mechanical arms and always wears sunglasses, funds the villains of the episodes to take down Robo, all because the Robocop program takes away funding from his ED-260 project. To make sure the world of RoboCop is more kid-friendly, Robocop's origin is changed to remove death, as in the intro, Alex is mortally wounded in the line of duty, causing OCP to outfit him with the gear that makes him RoboCop). Also, the series derails from the movie it's based on by being more science fiction. Firearms are now replaced with laser weapons (with Robocop wielding a laser pistol that's set to stun at all times), as well as having some episode themed around a problem in real life (like racism in The Brotherhood, where the title villains are a group who want to destroy all robots and cyborgs in Old Detroit, while another episode, A Robot's Revenge, is themed around Middle Eastern Peace Project and terrorism, as Robocop and Lewis must protect two Middle Eastern leaders from terrorists who plot to assassinate them).

As this is an animated series, the cast have voice actors that are different from the movie. Robocop is voiced here by Dab Hennessey (who 80's would know as the voice actor for Genghis Rex, the main antagonist of Dinosaucers, as well as Chief Quimby in Inspector Gadget). Lewis is voiced by Susan Roman (who voiced Melissa Raccoon in The Raccoons), and Dr. McNamara is voiced by Robert Bockstael, an actor who before this, did voice work for The Adventures Of Teddy Ruxpin and Dennis The Menace. The animation is good, and the acting is well done. Sadly, this only lasted twelve episodes, with a thirteenth episode being passed in favor to create Pryde Of The X-Men, the failed pilot that would lead to an X-Men cartoon (but would inspire an arcade beat-em-up from Konami). However, this is a good cartoon that tries to take a R-rated film and make it kid-friendly.

I didn't realize that there was an animated Robocop series but I noticed that it lasted with only 12 episodes in 1988. I've watched every episode on YouTube. That Lieutenant Hedgecock was annoying. Well, the cartoon needed to have a jealous rival for Robocop. This cartoon took some inspirations from the 1987 film. When I saw Robocop's gun, it was just like a laser gun.

This cartoon is all right and I like it. I would usually watch them again on YouTube.

RoboCop was an awesome movie and could have been a great franchise. I mean this was an R-rated film and loads of parents let their kids see it. Even though it had limbs getting blown off, melting men, buckets of gore and satire that would, no doubt, go right over the heads of kids, it was still yapped about in every playground. I was one of them.

Yes, the violence was the main thing that attracted me to RoboCop. But I knew the difference between fiction and real life, I could tell that the film wasn't meant to be taken too seriously and, to tell the truth, upon repeat viewings I was more interested in RoboCop's tragic afterlife/rebirth than anything else.

But someone, somewhere thought that castrating Robo of all that was unique to him and selling it off direct to the kiddies was a good idea. It certainly was not. Movies can often make great kid's shows (The Real Ghostbusters, Batman) but not when it means compromising everything that made it so good in the first place. Making a kid's of RoboCop is just as moronic as making a kid's show of Freddy Krueger. And how the hell can Clarence Boddicker be in it if he died in the movie?

Remember that massive gun of Robo's? Well when he shoots it in this cartoon there is no entry or exit wound, no blood and the baddies fall down and die anyway. Then, a few seconds later, they are alright and alive as Robo arrests them. What??? I may have been a child but I wasn't stupid! And why is it now some kind of laser gun? And if it blows holes in walls and doors and other giant robots (every other episode would feature a giant robot) then why would it not blow apart a human? The main focus of every episode was to have contrived, annoying characters who serve no purpose other than to make poor stories happen (Lt. Hedgecock especially) spout appalling dialogue and constantly put the man in the can down by calling him loads of silly names, like 'that bucket of bolts', 'that rustbucket', 'that tin can', 'that (fill-in-the-blank but use either rust or bolts or bucket or can)'. I know characters need adversaries or obstacles. But this was pathetic.

No kid liked this show. It insulted their intelligence and embarrassed a great movie. Forget that it exists. Even if they kept the main RoboCop theme or maintained the political subplots (yes, a child CAN understand this) it could have been bearable.

Sadly, as it is, it's unbearable.