About a month ago I was on TubiTV to check to see if they had any "new" Rifftrax and stuff and then I saw they had the Robocop TV series from 1994-1995. I remembered I'd watched a few episodes back in the day when it aired in syndication on the local Fox network (Channel 66 out of Flint), probably at like 4pm on Saturday afternoon before they reran the prior week DS9 or whatever, this being before Fox had college football and NASCAR and all that stuff.
I hadn't watched the whole series and I had nothing else I wanted to watch, so what the hell, right? I binged all 22 episodes over 3 hot, humid days and found it highly watchable and fun. The show was made in Canada for Canadian TV in the 90s so obviously it didn't have the effects budget or notable actors of the movies and since it was on TV they couldn't have as much graphic violence, blood, and gore. Still, it was better than the two American studio-made sequel movies and the godawfully dull 2015 reboot.
The thing about it is, I think while they didn't have the budget or the R rating, they still kept the same basic premise and tone of the original. There were serious parts, but it was never too serious and unlike the crappy reboot they didn't change things in ways that didn't work.
It starts with a 2-hour episode, or I guess you could say a TV movie to introduce the situation and new characters. This in theory takes place after the third movie because Robocop's partner/friend Ann Lewis is dead and the Delta City project is a reality. The rich and middle-class live in Delta City while the poor still inhabit "Old Detroit." Robocop, formerly Officer Alex Murphy, works from the Metro South precinct that's run by a Sergeant Parks, which doesn't make much sense since in reality shouldn't there be a Captain or Lieutenant or Chief to run the show?
Instead of Ann Lewis, there's a female cop named Lisa Madigan who similarly figured out Robocop's secret identity and works with him. There's also an engineer named Charlie Lippincott who keeps Robocop running and a little girl named Gadget who frequently shows up to annoy Parks until, seeing the crappy conditions she lives in, he finally adopts her. Those characters along with the chairman of Omni Consumer Products (OCP) remain in the place through all 22 episodes.
Another character is added in the opening TV movie when a young female secretary named Diana is murdered by an OCP exec and a mad scientist to use her brain to power a computer called "MetroNet" that is supposed to run all the utilities and stuff in Delta City. Diana remains as sort of a ghost in the machine and she can access machines and computer systems--including Robocop. She becomes a secret ally and a special friend for him because they share a common bond of having human memories but not human bodies. Though Robocop is not supposed to lie, he does hide Diana's existence to make sure she doesn't get wiped out or used as a lab rat or anything.
The show retains a lot of the snarky stuff from the original movie like the MediaBreak newscasts that are often filled with propaganda for OCP and outrageous stories like a wall being built in Beverly Hills to keep out the poors. Instead of the goofy commercials for things like the "Nuke 'Em" home game there's a series of animated commercials with OCP's hero Commander Cash who pedals dangerous products like "Sterettes" anabolic steroids for kids and a "Nite-Nite" doll that doubles as a hand grenade. Those things helped to make it a lot more fun than the dreary reboot and the two sequels.
As I said since it was on TV there was a lot less violence, blood, and gore. Instead of shooting everyone or stabbing them with his computer hacking spike, Robocop will shoot the gun from someone's hand or punch them or something less R-rated. And to my relief no goons get mutated by toxic waste, though one of the recurring villains named Pudface Morgan does have a kind of nasty-looking face.
Besides the characters I mentioned, Alex Murphy's wife and 13-14-year-old-ish son frequently appear along with his parents. His father, a former cop, works with him on a couple of cases and eventually realizes his son is still alive--sort of. But Murphy's wife and son don't find out his secret identity. Maybe that would have happened if there were a season 2 or more but there wasn't.
About 5 years later, the same production company and Canadian TV network did 4 TV movies under the banner Prime Directives. I watched them on Netflix years ago but after watching the TV show I decided to rewatch them on Amazon Prime. These were more R-rated with more blood, gore, and graphic violence, though still not as much as the movies. They aren't connected to the TV series, though they use footage from that show in commercials for "Robocop's Greatest Hits." The biggest difference is that Murphy's wife died two years after he became Robocop and their son James grew up in an orphanage. There were still the Media Break inserts but less goofy commercials; instead there's a Bill O'Reilly-type talking head.
Like the TV series opening movie a lot of the story revolves around a computer system that's going to take over all the utilities and stuff. In this case it's called SAINT and a dipshit exec at OCP is rushing it into production. There's also a bad guy in Old Detroit who wants to use the program to distribute a computer virus called Legion that can infect people. Meanwhile after 10 years on the job, Robocop is feeling his age and then has to shoot his old partner John Cable to stop a madman. Cable's ex-wife, the head of Security Concepts, resurrects Cable as a second Robocop who has darker gray armor, a mirrored visor, and two guns that are stored in his thighs. Cable's ex-wife is also using Alex Murphy's son, a junior exec at OCP, to do some of her dirty work.
Everything comes to a head in the final movie as Robocop, his son, and a renegade who's like a combination of Trinity from The Matrix and Darth Maul head for OCP headquarters to deactivate SAINT before it can spread Legion. In the end Cable dies to stop Legion and SAINT but before he does so, he wipes all the prime directives and stuff from Robocop's system so he's free to do what he wants. The Legion/SAINT debacle destroys OCP while Robocop finally reveals his true identity to the world and works with his son to rebuild Old Detroit.
Getting back to the question in the title of the entry, it is strange that Canadian TV with a much lower budget and no big name stars managed to deliver stories that were more fun and far less stupid than the American studio sequels and definitely the reboot. It's hard to say why this is except maybe they had less expectations and thus more freedom for their stories. And they didn't have Frank Miller writing. That probably helped too. I'm not saying the Canadian show and movies are great but they are better and fun binge watching.
Between the two, I liked the TV show better. It was more fun and less grim-and-gritty like the movies. And also I think Richard Eden was a better Robocop/Murphy than Page Fletcher. Fletcher looked too old for the Murphy flashback scenes and sometimes his voice would sound like Tracks on the old Transformers TV show or Judge Whitey on Futurama. That's probably just me, but it is my blog, so there.
Fun Facts: Not surprisingly since they were made in Canada, the show and movies feature actors from other Canadian-made shows like Due South, Earth Final Conflict, and Red Green. In the TV series, Sergeant Parks is played by Blu Mankuma, who voiced Tigatron in the Transformers Beast Wars series that was also made in Canada. Former WWF wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper plays the creator of Commander Cash, who goes crazy because OCP stole the property from him. The irony is that the episode is about a company using hidden messages to brainwash kids and Piper played the hero in They Live, which similarly involved hidden messages brainwashing people, but sadly he doesn't say anything about being out of bubble gum or kicking asses.
Like the original movie, the OCP Chairman in the TV show and later the female CEO in the TV movies is never referred to by name but simply as the Chairman/CEO or "the old man/woman."
In the original movie Robocop drives a Ford Taurus, which in 1987 looked pretty futuristic. In the TV show he upgrades to a Mustang, which had just undergone a redesign so it looked a bit more futuristic. The funny thing is early on they took the iconic pony off the front of the car but later the pony reappears. In the TV movies, he kind of downgrades to a Chevy Impala, which was a souped-up Chevy Caprice like normal cops drove at the time.
The opening credits of the TV show reshoots some bits from the original movie with the replacement actors, but in the first episode it shows a clip from the original movie of Alex Murphy being shot by Clarence Boddeker (Kurtwood Smith) and his goons. The same clip is also shown in one of the TV movies.
Though I'm too lazy to check for sure, I'm 99% sure the exterior they show of the police station--"Metro South" in the TV show and something else in the movies--is the same one they used the exterior of in Due South, only I think they changed the cars in front and shot from a different angle.
For about half the TV series the end credits used a bastardized version of the original movie theme song. Then it changed to a song by 80s rocker Lita Ford and Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh. The last few episodes even featured part of a music video for the song. It seemed like kind of an unnecessary waste of money but whatever. I have no idea if you can find the song on iTunes or not.
A not-so-fun fact about watching the TV show on TubiTV is they had a couple of episodes in the wrong order. In one episode the OCP chairman is intent on getting a lung transplant for a little kid, which seemed really out of character for him. It was in the next episode shown that you find out the kid's parents saved the Chairman's life so to repay them he wanted to make sure the kid got a lung transplant. The last two episodes were also in the wrong order, so the series finale was actually the penultimate episode. They were listed under the wrong names so someone got their wires crossed. It was probably the same for those earlier two episodes too. Season 2 of the original Battlestar Galactica had a similar problem, but I guess it is free so you get what you pay for, right?
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