Mother Jones
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Detroit, Michigan, is finally getting its monument to RoboCop.
Last May, photos began circulating online of a giant statue made in honor of the legendary cyborg law enforcer. It’s the result of a Kickstarter campaign by the Imagination Station, a Detroit nonprofit specializing in art and renovation. Three months later, the statue has finally reached Detroit soil.
The model, assembled at Across the Board Creations in British Colombia, arrived Wednesday afternoon in a crate. “Slow and steady wins the race,” Brandon Walley, director of development at the Imagination Station, wrote me earlier this week. But the statue’s journey began long before this summer. The story of how this RoboCop duplicate came into being is a complex two-year saga involving Hollywood executives, political division, gonzo art—and the actual star of RoboCop.
The statue’s origin is, in fact, entirely political. In early 2011, the Democratic Mayor of Detroit and retired NBA Hall of Famer Dave Bing was promoting the Detroit Works Project, an initiative that called for community input to create a “strategic framework plan” for the city. He got the word out on Twitter, which earned him some thoughtful response—and the standard jest. One of the tweeted suggestions came from user @MT, who asked if the city would devote a chunk of its budget to erecting a statue to RoboCop, the eponymous protagonist from Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 action film, which is set in a futuristic, chaotic, and ruined Detroit. (For the uninitiated, the film RoboCop satirizes the excess and horrors of the Reagan era. The character and franchise has since become an American pop-culture icon. A 2014 remake is on the way.)
This is all Mayor Bing had to say about @MT’s modest proposal:
@mt There are not any plans to erect a statue to Robocop.Thank you for the suggestion.
— Mayor Dave Bing (@mayordavebing)
…which spurred further discussion on the matter:
@mayordavebing Philadelphia has a statue of Rocky & Robocop would kick Rocky’s butt. He’s a GREAT ambassador for Detroit.
— @MT (@MT)
@mayordavebing @mt While I’d love to see a statue, what about any plans to build an ACTUAL Robocop?
— FuzzHats (@FuzzHats)
Bing did not entertain the idea of building a fully functional killing machine, either.
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