RoboCop/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The films:

  • Actor Allusion: Inverted in the second movie - Belinda Bauer stars as psychologist Dr. Faxx, and later went on to become a qualified psychologist herself.
  • Avoid the Dreaded G Rating: Seriously Inverted. It's rare that a movie is given an an X-rating (the 80s version of NC-17) for violence alone, but the director claimed he had to edit the first film eight times to avoid that happening. Still, the original version has been released on DVD since then.
  • Awesome, Dear Boy: Part of the reason why Paul Verhoeven did the first film. He initially rejected the opportunity to direct it when he read the script and thought it was silly and stupid. He changed his mind when his wife convinced him that there were more layers to the story than he initially thought, and because the writers pointed out the amount of Gorn there was, to which he responded "Well, I've never seen the hero get his hand blown off!"
  • Fake American: Dr. Faxx in the second movie is played by Australian Belinda Bauer. See also Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping.
  • Hey, It's That Guy!
  • Playing Against Type: Prior to playing Dick Jones, Ronny Cox played nice guys. However, Dick Jones also set up a new type for him, as proven by Senator Robert Kinsey and Vilos Cohaagen.
  • Shout-Out: The Show Within a Show I'd Buy That for a Dollar is a homage to the idiot's TV-derived catchphrase from the dystopic SF novel The Marching Morons, updated for inflation. Originally: "I'd buy that for a quarter!" [1]
    • In 2, Caine is overseeing the development of new versions of nuke, one of which is named Blue Velvet, likely after the song. But just maybe because the chemist working on it is named Frank.
  • Throw It In
    • RoboCop was supposed to stop the rapist holding his target as a shield with a precision headshot. When staging the scene, they saw how perfectly a bullet could fly through the woman's dress...
    • The politician being thrown to the ground was supposed to be just out of sight. The dummy they used for the scene had its legs kick up comically when it landed and was visible to the cameras. It looked too funny to leave out.

TV-Shows

  • Shout-Out
    • When Robo boards a helicopter to get into the blocked-off OCP building in one episode of the TV series, he asks the pilot to "Take me up, Scotty."
    • At the end of a an episode of Prime Directives, RoboCop muses that the world only makes sense when you force it to.
    • The original animated series had an unexpected nod to Murphy's death, with a flashback to the very end of the scene, Boddicker's "Fun's over" and the final shot to Murphy's head, rendered in animation.
  1. The star of the show, Bixby Snyder, is possibly a homage to Benny Hill. Or a parody. In a supposedly-filmed scene, there's one final newscast where the newsreaders announce that Snyder has been arrested for receiving sexual favors from underaged co-stars.