I heard about this campaign on Facebook, and at first, while I thought it was indeed an awesome idea to build a statue to RoboCop in Detroit, I didn’t know if it had anything to do with The Zombie Rights Campaign.

And then it hit me: RoboCop died, and came back as a cyborg sworn to uphold justice and protect the citizens of Detroit. He’s probably not, technically, a Zombie, but he most certainly IS Differently Animated.

This is an opportunity to get a statue made commemorating a Differently Animated figure from the media!

Just look at how RoboCop is perceived by the general public. From RoboCop’s wikipedia page:

RoboCop is a 1987 American science fiction-action film directed by Paul Verhoeven. Set in a crime-ridden Detroit, Michigan in the near future, RoboCop centers on a police officer who is brutally murdered and subsequently re-created as a super-human cyborg known as “RoboCop”. The film features Peter Weller, Dan O’Herlihy, Kurtwood Smith, Nancy Allen, Miguel Ferrer, and Ronny Cox.

In addition to being an action film, RoboCop includes larger themes regarding the media, resurrection, gentrification, corruption, and human nature. It received positive reviews and cited as one of the best films of 1987; spawning merchandise, two sequels, a television series, two animated TV series, and a television mini-series, video games and two comic book adaptations.

…

RoboCop is guided by three prime directives written into his programming: serve the public trust, protect the innocent and uphold the law.

Isn’t that precisely the sort of image of the Differently Animated we want to project? Don’t we want the public to know that, just because someone’s come back from the dead, they don’t have to be a target of fear and scorn? That the Differently Animated have something positive to contribute to society?

This isn’t the first time that a Differently Animated police officer has helped to improve the public image of the Post-Mortem Achiever set, of course. Reg Shoe (who really needs his own wikipedia page but has a pretty good one at this Discworld Wiki) has served in the police forces of Ankh-Morpork for some time now in the Discworld novels. But RoboCop is a distinctly American personality, and easily as worthy of a statue as some boxer.

I mean, what did Rocky ever really do for anyone? Did he serve the public or uphold the law? As far as I can tell he beat up a Russian and Mr. T, and that’s about it. Is that really comparable to a life of public service in law enforcement? I think not.

So yes, please support both the public arts and the Differently Animated in Detroit and kick in a few bucks if you can to the Detroit Needs RoboCop campaign on Kickstarter. We’re pledging 35 dollars to this worthy goal here at the ZRC; the fundraiser is open for another 40 days so there’s plenty of time to dig through your couch cushions a bit if need be.

Do it for RoboCop. He’d do it for you.

Tags: Movies, Social Justice, Zombies Doing Good

This entry was posted by John Sears on Monday, February 14th, 2011 at 12:08 am and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.