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Detroit Will Get a Robocop Statue

Following a crowdsourced campaign on Kickstarter, the City of Detroit will erect a Robocop statue.

Following a crowdsourced campaign on Kickstarter, the City of Detroit will erect a Robocop statue.

If you have seen the film, it paints a bleak depiction of a dystopian Detroit where crime is so out of control (ring any bells?) the privatised police force have to ressurect a barely alive police officer and transform him into a super-human cyborg.

The campaign began last week when someone suggested on Twitter to the city’s mayor (the wonderfully named Dave Bing) that a statue of the character from Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 film was needed.

When Mayor Bing, or someone working for him, tweeted back an internet campaign gathered steam via a Facebook group and Kickstarter (a site used to raise small donations online) was used to realise the dream of casting a big metal Robocop in the city.

The organisers recently said:

The financial goal? $50,000, which was reached today. It took just a week to raise that money, thanks in part to a big donation from Pete Hottelet at Omni Consumer Products Corporation (yeah, thatโ€™s right) and more than 1700 other people who pledged cash.

And here is the latest update on Kickstarter:

Weโ€™ve reached the $50,000 goal with the help of many many supporters and a very generous contribution from Pete Hottelet at www.omniconsumerproductscorporation.com, but you can still contribute, so please keep backing the project. All the reward levels still stand, and weโ€™re currently discussing how to branch this project and fundraising into bigger and bigger things with a better and better impact on Detroit. Thank you, everybody! Wow.

Now all they have to do is build the statue, which might not be as easy as they initally thought:

None of us have ever made a giant solid metal permanent sculpture before. It turns out to be a pretty expensive process (who would have thought?), but not too much for the world to fund. After talking to numerous sculptors and metal workers, the current game plan is this: We can take a relatively small figure of RoboCop (conceivably even an action figure), have it 3D scanned by lasers (cool!) and scale its form to create a light-weight model of any size weโ€™d like, which can then be used to pour and cast liquid metal. Casey V. Westbrook and crew are currently leading the charge to create a weatherized 7 foot tall iron statue.

What next? A statue of ED-209?

> Kickstarter page for the campaign
> More about Robocop and Detroit at Wikipedia