UPDATE: Robo fans are trying to raise the money for a statue on their own, and have set up the site Detroit Needs RoboCop to crowd-fund the project. According to the Detroit Free Press: “If all goes as planned, enthusiasts will erect a statue, created by a metro Detroit artist, at Imagination Station, an outdoor art project near the abandoned Michigan Central Station just off Michigan Avenue.”
February 8, 2011: In Paul Verhoeven’s violent classic ROBOCOP, the circuitry-filled crimefighter almost single-handedly rids a crumbling Detroit of a wide variety of common and corporate creeps.
Those heroic and ballistic actions are not sufficient to be immortalized in effigy on the actual city’s grounds, however. Detroit Mayor/OCP employee Dave Bing initially solicited advice online looking for ideas for the city, and received the notion of a ROBOCOP statue.
But it’s no-go for Robo. Bing responded to such Twitter requests with his own tweeting: “There are not any plans to erect a statue to RoboCop. Thank you for your suggestion.”
How Murphy’s armor-clad police-borg fails to merit such an honor is lost on ROBOCOP fans: “Some people just don’t get it,” grumbled one message on Twitter. Another wrote: “If I were mayor of Detroit, my top priority would be a RoboCop statue.”
Indeed, such disrespect is clearly a crime. But apparently not covered under the prime directives.