Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-Review by Prof. Popinjay

A made for TV miniseries consisting of four 95 minute episodes, this continuation of the Robocop franchise attempts to return to its darker more violent roots after the more family oriented Robocop TV series was criticized. This was still TV though so it’s a lite version of darkness, if you can imagine.

Is there a TV movie version of “Jump the Shark”? If there isn’t, I might recommend “Network the Navel”. Yeah, that happens in this. A character has a computer network port in her bellybutton and they definitely use it. It was a brief but very uncomfortable scene and frankly I’m actually a bit offended and disgusted by it but that may just be my modern sensibilities. Today I think people would be in an uproar about this. Perhaps they might’ve been back when this came out too but this series had absolutely NO promotional efforts behind it. I’m certain Jack Elmlinger was the only person to have seen this besides myself.

The fake commercials and the “I’d buy that for a dollar” slogan was back and probably the best part of this. One investigative reporter was clearly ad-libbing his lines as he snuck around the Robocop cave (lair? I don’t know.) He was pretty great.
I watched this on Amazon with ads and every so often Dany Devito would show up promoting Jersey Mike’s Sandwiches. I couldn’t tell the difference between the fake commercials and the Amazon ads! I kept thinking “Holy Crap! They got Danny Devito for this movie!?!” Were that the case, this movie would’ve been fully endorsed by me.

The series as a whole wasn’t bad. Wasn’t the best thing I’d ever seen either. Really I think it was the music choice that saved this series for me. It doesn’t matter how awful a production is, if you add Ennio Morriconé style spaghetti western gun duel music over the fight scenes it just makes everything better. It worked in Baz Lurman’s “Romeo + Juliet”. Why shouldn’t it work for RoboCop?

Fair warning: Things got really hokey toward the end. Really, really hokey.