Detroit's Glorious Robocop Statue, Nearly a Decade in the Making, Is Almost Done
Detroit's extremely long-delayed bronze statue of RoboCop will be finished in March.
We've almost invented actual robot cops in the nine years it's taken to complete the statue.
The huge statue was delayed by copyright problems, manufacturing issues, and more.
After nine years, Detroit is finally getting that RoboCop statue, dammit. The Detroit Free Press reports that the comically long-delayed statue’s parts are all fully fabricated, and now they're all just waiting on a final weld and finishing patina. But the statue’s journey has been long and arduous.
In 2011, a Twitter user suggested to Detroit’s mayor that RoboCop—the superhuman cyborg law enforcer from the Motor City in the film franchise—was a great potential mascot for the city of Detroit, much like how Rocky Balboa represents Philadelphia. At the time, Detroit was in the news mostly for its ongoing economic and population crises, which were profoundly worsened by the nationwide recession. So Brandon Walley and Jerry Paffendorf opened a Kickstarter from the now-defunct Imagination Station Detroit.
In one of the campaign’s first updates, they said the official licensed maker of RoboCops for sale, Fred Barton, was going to fabricate the molds used to then cast the statue. Famous last words.
In 2012, “[W]e just checked back in with Fred Barton who has assured us that the parts will be ready soon.” In 2013, “[N]ow he's headed to Venus Bronze Works in Detroit for casting and manufacturing in bronze.” In 2014, they said the statue would be unveiled later that year, and in December 2014, they said the following spring. Finally, in 2018, they said, “The first steps took years, and then when the foam parts and armature arrived at the last bronze shop in Detroit it took years more.”
The Free Press says realities of the manufacturing process, combined with copyright issues—did they not have a licensing agreement when they began raising money?—should be familiar to anyone who’s backed a many-times-delayed or even canceled Kickstarter campaign.
The statue is slated to stand outside the Michigan Science Center, but that institution, too, has changed leadership in the time since it was announced. The new leader told the Free Press that “he doesn't want to comment on any specifics until the statue actually is finished.”
On the Kickstarter campaign’s most recent update, one backer wrote in a comment, “In this time this project was funded until now ... Detroit entered and exited bankruptcy, a NEW Robocop movie was shot, edited and released, and Detroit has flourished and become almost an unrecognizably BETTER city.”
The statue, now finally nearing completion, is 11 feet tall, with a base that weighs a half ton on its own. The whole RoboCop body is made of bronze and will be finished with dark gray patina that mimics the original RoboCop costumes worn in the movies. Those costumes were made of fiberglass, foam, and plastic, and even so, they weighed at least 50 pounds. Each movie had a new spin on the suit, from different paint colors to better mobility.
The patina on the statue will be gray, but the original suits have something in common with naturally occurring patina on bronze. “The RoboCop suits are more green than anything when seen in real life,” the RoboCop Archive site explains. “[T]hey're painted with a special photoreactive paint that registers metallic on film.”
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