Robocop: TV Pilot is stupid. But... in a good way.

I was in Grouchos the other day and I saw the pilot for the Robocop TV series. TV series based off movies are almost always terrible compared to the film, so I thought it would be a good thing to moan about on this blog. But, shockingly, I was wrong.

It is stupid though. Very stupid.
-The main actor couldn't look less like Robocop from the films.
-They changed the names of half the characters due to rights issues, which I don't understand because they didn't have the rights to names, but there's clips from the films in the show, so they had the rights to that? Seems a bit odd.
-There are two annoying kids as bad as the one from Rob 3, but they're in the show far less than the film.
-OCP, the villainous corporation from the films are just shown as a bit stupid, not paying attention to one of their misguided scientists.
-There's a bunch of very 90s street kids who say stuff like "complete the square" and "eat my shorts" which makes this very dated.
-Half the actors play this like the first two films, so seriously and realistic. But then the other half ham it up so bad they might as well be in Batman and Robin.
-Theres a very Batman villian who had a chemical accident and hates Rob.
-Rob gets shot by a rocket and dies. For like the 90th time.
-It's a very mixed tone. It's shot like the films, so it seems dark and gritty, but the action and dialogue is very family friendly, except for one really disturbing conversation about sexercise. So none of it seems to match up.
-And the final and most annoying point for me. Robocop never shoots anyone. To make it family friendly, the bad guys can kill people, but Rob never does. Which just doesn't sit right with me. Robocop has probably the highest bodycount of anyone on film except maybe Rambo. And it just seems odd that he never shoots anyone. He even killed people in Robocop 3, which was supposed to be kid friendly. I dunno, it might be nitpicking, but I just don't like it.

Ok, maybe it had a lot of problems. It wasn't very good. But it wasn't horrible. It was well made, well shot and sets the scene for a TV series pretty well. Although the story was a bit silly and some of the actors were terrible, it was all good fun. It was based on a rejected draft for Robocop 2, which shows, because it's not as good as 2, but it's not a horrifying mess like 3. I enjoyed sitting through it at least. After some of Robocop branded shite I've watched, this wasn't the best, but it definately wasn't the worst.



*The plot's about a computer that controls everything in the city built by an evil OCP scientist. Also the plot of Robocop: Prime Directives, brought out years after this. So Prime Directives wasn't even original. Another nail in that coffin. I really hate those films.