Just getting home from a photo-taking expedition in the snow and my neighbour points the camera out to me.
Now, the flash camera has been there for a while, we’ve complained about it before and we’ve been told the objective is to move people on. Seeing as this is our communal garden I’ve never really felt that was an adequate explanation.
There’s no illegal activity here, no anti-social behaviour. The worst it ever gets is the kids running round which, I understand, some people might not like, but frankly kids should run round – it’s their job.
My first thought was of this scene from John Carpenter’s Escape From New York (1981) where Snake Plisskin (Kurt Russell) is ‘processed’ just before he gets the offer of rescuing the President:
But of course, the most infamous robot law enforcer designed by city bureaucrats is ED-209 from Robocop (1987):
To paraphrase The Old Man (played by Dan O’Herlihy): “Camden, I’m VERY disappointed”
It is all a bit different from Detroit, where a Robocop statue is going to get built after a Kickstarter campaign began after someone tweeted the Mayor’s office.
By the way, this Robocop inspired rap by DJ Mayhem & MC Mouthmaster Murf (posted by YouTube user robomayhem) is genius:
If you have seen the film, it paints a bleak depiction of a dystopian Detroit where crime is so out of control (ring any bells?) the privatised police force have to ressurect a barely alive police officer and transform him into a super-human cyborg.
The campaign began last week when someone suggested on Twitter to the city’s mayor (the wonderfully named Dave Bing) that a statue of the character from Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 film was needed.
When Mayor Bing, or someone working for him, tweeted back an internet campaign gathered steam via a Facebook group and Kickstarter (a site used to raise small donations online) was used to realise the dream of casting a big metal Robocop in the city.
The financial goal? $50,000, which was reached today. It took just a week to raise that money, thanks in part to a big donation from Pete Hottelet at Omni Consumer Products Corporation (yeah, that’s right) and more than 1700 other people who pledged cash.
And here is the latest update on Kickstarter:
We’ve reached the $50,000 goal with the help of many many supporters and a very generous contribution from Pete Hottelet at www.omniconsumerproductscorporation.com, but you can still contribute, so please keep backing the project. All the reward levels still stand, and we’re currently discussing how to branch this project and fundraising into bigger and bigger things with a better and better impact on Detroit. Thank you, everybody! Wow.
Now all they have to do is build the statue, which might not be as easy as they initally thought:
None of us have ever made a giant solid metal permanent sculpture before. It turns out to be a pretty expensive process (who would have thought?), but not too much for the world to fund. After talking to numerous sculptors and metal workers, the current game plan is this: We can take a relatively small figure of RoboCop (conceivably even an action figure), have it 3D scanned by lasers (cool!) and scale its form to create a light-weight model of any size we’d like, which can then be used to pour and cast liquid metal. Casey V. Westbrook and crew are currently leading the charge to create a weatherized 7 foot tall iron statue.
