Posted in: Movies | Tagged: detroit, robocop

No Robocop Statue for Detroit, But Plenty Of Other Cities Are Happy To Play Along, Have Fun

Published Tue, 08 Feb 2011 15:36:35 -0600

Last updated Tue, 08 Feb 2011 15:36:45 -0600

Kate Atherton writes for Bleeding Cool:

When Detroit's mayor Dave Bing announced plans to rejuvenate the city and boost its law and order, you would have thought that a statue of Detroit's most famous law enforcement officer would have been top of his list. Nothing like a physical reminder of lawfulness and moral rectitude to inspire one's citizens to take pride in their metropolis. But no, Mayor Bing tweeted the following:

There are not any plans to erect a statue to Robocop. Thank you for the suggestion.

Short and sweet and disappointing. Possibly, Bing would prefer a sculpture of a Ford, or a statue of Eminem, perhaps.

By rejecting the idea of having Robocop loom large above the potential crime-doers of Detroit, Mayor Bing is also turning his back on the opportunity to advance a new tradition of decorating towns and cities with upstanding, laudable figures, who never actually existed. You may run out of presidents and generals, but the movies are a bottomless pit.

It's all the fault of Sylvester Stallone, of course. He donated a statue of himself as Rocky to the city of Philadelphia. It's not known whether they wanted it or not – or if it inspired an unusually large proportion of the Philadelphia population to box. But it's what they got.

Whereas statues of actors are relatively common (there's barely a city without a statue of Charlie Chaplin, for instance, and there are so many John Wayne sculptures in parts of the United States that they might even be described as a glut), replicas of imagined figures are less so. Copenhagen has its Little Mermaid, London Zoo has Winnie the Pooh – well, actually, it's a sculpture of a bear, but it inspired the creation of Winnie the Pooh. Rarer are statues of robots.

However… further research has revealed that although robot statues are few in number in the western hemisphere, in the east they are not only more common, they are a source of positive competition between nations and even seen as a potential solution to the conflict between North and South Korea. The Escapist reported on the trend of giant robot building back in 2009, envisaging a future of giant robot dominated cities.

Clearly, Mayor Dave Bing does not realise just how out of step he is and what an opportunity he is throwing away.

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