PROTOTYPES
By: Jody Duncan
Attempts by Omni Consumer Products to develop a new and improved RoboCop are uniformly disastrous. The human brains selected are unable to reconcile their former organic states with their current mechanized ones.
Though he is haunted by the memories and feelings of his life as Alex J. Murphy, RoboCop has been a resounding success as a law enforcement officer.
In RoboCop 2, Omni Consumer Products attempts to repeat that success, producing two new and 'improved' RoboCops -both of which prove to be dismal failures incapable of making the psychological transition from man to machine. The two failed prototypes were designed by Craig Davies and the idea was to show the progression from the original RoboCop to what finally succeeds as RoboCop 2. The failures were also meant to illustrate the fact that these scientists didn't have their shit together -these things just didn't work. They were really supposed to be sort of black humor jokes, too; so they tried to make them funny and low-tech.
CRAIG DAVIES:
In designing them, I thought in terms of what would be the most terrible thing to have happen to you, and that led me to the two designs -one was ahead that has been chopped off and stuffed inside a diving bell; the other was a person completely encased in metal, with only little slits for eyes and a slit for a mouth and nothing more."
Working from Davies' designs, modelmaker Paula Lucchesi sculpted the twelve-inch models out of clay. John Reed then molded them in cast urethane. Armatures were designed by Tom St. Amand and machined by Blair Clark. Paula did most of the detailing on the puppets, painted them and added all the little wires to them. Then Davies went in and airbrushed them a bit to add some highlights and shadows.
A tiny rear process screen was incorporated into the diving bell model. allowing an actual face to be projected in from behind for a shot of the distraught cyborg shooting himself in the head. It is a closeup shot in which his visor opens up and then he shoots himself. Phil Tippett photographed Davies face for the shot, and that is what was rear-projected into the model. The head of the second RoboCop prototype was constructed from a small plastic skull that was found in the model shop. Little white beads were painted and applied for eyes, and the top of the skull was then sawn off to allow a miniature brain and wiring to be inserted.
