Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop (1987) was a stupid, silly, implausible, satirical, strangely-brilliant, unsettlingly-prescient movie about a cyborg police officer created by a corporation angling to take over Detroit’s city government. What’s interesting is that part of that premise might be happening now. What’s disappointing is that it has nothing to do with cyborgs:

Detroit is a city in flux. There are bright spots — pockets of development, a vibrant art scene, sophisticated restaurants, and a growing number of community gardens — but signs of life are overshadowed by miles and miles of blight. Last May, the state turned Detroit’s public schools over to an emergency manager, a businessman named Roy Roberts with a long history in the auto industry and financial markets.

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Could Detroit become the first major city in America to have all of its public services privatized? Signs are pointing in that direction. The question for those living on the precipice in the Metro Detroit area is whether to stay and turn things around or leave before they get worse.

In Robocop, the mega-corporation OCP has plans to raze old Detroit and build a new, sleek office park called Delta City. The Detroit Police Department, as portrayed in the film, serve at the pleasure of a bunch of smarmy MBA’s in suits. We know that these guys are evil because, at a demonstration of new robotic police technology that results in a junior exec getting cut in half by machine gun fire in the middle of a board room, the CEO’s only disappointment is at how far it will set back their production schedule. The least-evil exec, Bob Morton (played by smarmy virtuoso Miguel Ferrer), refers to the other guy’s evsceration as “life in the big city.”

Anyway, then a bunch of shit blows up (including Bob Morton), the criminal gang and the most-evil exec get offed by Robocop, and OCP lives to dominate another day. Then there were some sequels that sucked.

Then, I did not know until today, there was a television series that ran from 1994-95. It was produced in Canada and syndicated in the U.S. by Fox, and everything about it screams “filmed in Toronto.” I found this clip while looking for the famous ED-209 scene from the movie. The production values are on par with a mid-1990’s Canadian scifi television program, and the premise of this clip probably seemed far-fetched in 1994. It’s kind of hauntingly familiar now.

RoboCop The Series 1×08 – Provision 22

Two shady execs in charge of OCP’s new welfare program, being tested in Delta City before going nationwide, are keeping people from getting out of the system and using sophisticated (and damaging) brainwashing to get their way and keep their bank accounts full. When Murphy discovers underhanded loopholes have kept his wife and child from receiving his benefits, and been keeping them in the welfare program, he must try to find a way around the system and get his family help while the two execs conspire with a felonious explosives expert to settle the situation once and for all.

I suppose its level of familiarness will depend on how you view Wall Street, the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, etc. It’s not so much the mind control as the manipulation of welfare and other financial systems. Definitely watch it long enough to catch the futuristic newscast and the “Captain Cash” cartoon. The show definitely kept the spirit of Verhoeven’s original.