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, thatโs right) and more than 1700 other people who pledged cash.
And here is the latest update on Kickstarter:
Weโve 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 weโre 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 weโd 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