Alex Murphy made a remarkable recovery after being brutally murdered by a gang of criminals in the dystopian future of Detroit. Not only did a bunch of cybernetic enhancements enable him to get back on the streets and start policing (with extreme prejudice) as RoboCop over the course of three films, a remake and a couple of TV series, but his resurrection also meant he could make a wide variety of increasingly odd media appearances. There was the pay-per-view wrestling match when he teamed up with WCW stars like Sting to promote the upcoming release of RoboCop 2. There was the time he got drafted in to sell fried chicken in Korea around the time the first film came out. Those were all your requisite tie-ins to advertise the release of a film, however, rather than characters living on in commercials after they've stopped appearing on the big screen. To see how RoboCop was resurrected a second time - another of those Jesus parallels that director Paul Verhoeven put into the original film entirely deliberately, apparently (remember he walks on water as well) - you need to dream a little bigger, darling. Yes, it's even stranger than Murphy walking into a wrestling ring or stealing a family's fridge-freezer. Well, maybe not stranger than the second one, but whatever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tUag07bW8w Somehow, somewhere, sometime, and for some reason RoboCop got drafted into to hawk Nissin UFO Noodles in Japan. Instead of the machine gun that pops out of his mechanical leg, he now has a pair of chopsticks. In the first spot he keeps his strong jaw and straight-laced demeanour, something which goes totally out of the window with the second commercial, which seems to involve the future of law enforcement endorsing electric toothbrushes and onesies in his likeness whilst a row of gentlemen clad in the latter outfit chant his name. This isn't one of those sad cases of a beloved character being resurrected out of sheer greed, their reputations being destroyed in the process. It's too charming and, frankly, totally insane for that. Plus if you want to get a little post-modern and meta about it you could suggest that this whole thing is simply an extension of the over-the-top satirical fake commercials that appear in the RoboCop films, where capitalism has gone completely haywire. Life imitating art and all that.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
