RoboCop arrived as one of the most iconic 80s movies ever made, and there has never been anything like it before or since. Luckily for us fans, die-hard filmmakers Eastwood Allen, Christopher Griffiths and Gary Smart have been tirelessly working on an all-immersive documentary about the making of Paul Verhoeven’s seminal cult classic which should see a release sometime next year. Not surprising, fans have been extremely excited to see what’s in store for this documentary since the RoboDoc trailer dropped. Today, we have a 20-minute exclusive preview from RoboDoc: The Creation of RoboCop, which takes a deep dive into the sci-fi classic and breaks down the very memorable enforcement droid ED-209.
In the RoboDoc: The Creation of RoboCop preview, we get to see some of the iconic actors and crew members from the original RoboCop discuss the creation and execution of ED-209. “Mr. Kinney Meets ED-209” has Ronny Cox offering up a break down on his character Dick Jones and his importance to the movie. We see firsthand how he ties into the creation of ED-209, and how their iconic boardroom scene all came together. We also get to see how this legendary killer robot was brought to life through the use of stop-motion animation.
Legendary animator and VFX artist Phil Tippet is on hand to go through the process of bringing this creation to the big screen, breathing life into ED-209, and turning this enforcement droid into one of the movie’s MVPs. ED-209 is a true robot legend. And this helps explains why he’s remained so enduring to fans throughout the past thirty years.
We also learn how a real ED-209 was created and placed physically on the set, so that the actors had something to work against. Director Paul Verhoeven was quite sick during this portion of the shoot, and when the droid arrived on set and was constructed, looking brilliant, the filmmaker didn’t compliment the creative team, instead he exclaimed, ‘Well, I hope the next director will appreciate it!’ Feigning as though he were about to quit the harsh shoot, or perish altogether before filming was completed.
We also get to meet Mr. Kinney, played by Kevin Page. The actor arrives to help break down the scene, and take fans behind the set the day this moment was shot. And we learn that Verhoeven played out all of ED-209’s scenes, recreating the infamous moment ED-209 goes offline, killing Mr. Kinney in one of the bloodiest scenes ever committed to film.
Currently, there is no release date for RoboDoc: The Creation of RoboCop as the team is still editing together what will end up being a 7-8 hour film which contains over 100 interviews from the original cast and crew of the original Orion Pictures Trilogy, the Canadian TV Series, comic books and video games. A complete exploration of the RoboCop phenomenon.
Thanks to the RoboDoc team we’re able to show off some amazing storyboards from the original RoboCop scene (seen below) which shows ED-209 blasting Mr. Kinney with enough firepower to take down a herd of elephants. Set early in the original Robocop, this is one of the movie’s most iconic and remembered scenes, and as you can see, a lot of painstaking work went into making this one of the greatest sci-fi movies in cinematic history.
