RoboCop

Decent cartoon version of the extremely violent 80's movie, with special nods on my part to the first episode which featured the Vandal's, my favorite badguys. My only complaint is that how is it that Clearance Boddicker appears in an episode of this cartoon, since Robocop killed him in the movie?

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.

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.

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.

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.