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Post Reverberation

by | Jan 11, 2024 | Read

I love Robocop. I have since 1987 when I saw it, unedited and in its full gory glory at the too-young age of 10 years-old. The movie defines and underlines a transition in my life from child to pre-teen when my parents finally stopped struggling to hold me back from gorging myself on, and swimming in a sea of adult-oriented pop culture that I’d been coveting ever since I saw multiple people lose arms and hands in a galaxy far, far away half a decade earlier. In 1987 I dove head-first into a world of horror, science fiction and fantasy that completely changed me as a person going forward. I found myself in that murky abyss of R-rated fiction, whether it was the novels of Stephen King & Clive Barker, the music of Metallica and Megadeth, comic books like the X-Men and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, or the film franchises like Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street. And Robocop was a cross section of all of these new interests.

It started with a fascination with the intense slapstick darkness of that first film, continued on to the Kenner toy line, was carried forward by the 1988 Nintendo game, furthered by the odd 1990 sequel film, and then solidified by the 1992 Dark Horse comic books. The original film has been a cornerstone of my physical media collection as it was the first VHS tape my folks bought, and with Batman 89, Back to the Future and the first FHE Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series release, it was the one I built my first VHS collection around. Over the years I’ve ended up buying the film on every format from the basic and eventually Special Edition DVDs, to Blu-ray and now 4K. I have five separate copies of the movie novelization written by Ed Naha including the first printings of the US, UK, French, Russian and Japanese editions. I have the Topps trading cards, the full run of the Marvel Comics series from 1990 (including the oversized movie adaptation from 1987), and at least seven different action figures ranging from the vintage Kenner and bootleg Lego minfig, to the more modern Super7 and NECA action figures. It’s a film that I’ve seen at least 30 times and one that I go back to for comfort when I’m feeling particularly stressed out.

All of this is to illustrate the place in my heart and mind that the film holds for me, and why a few days ago when I had a break from work and I felt like logging into Twitter to send out a silly dispatch from to hopefully drum up some conversations to keep me occupied later in the day, I shared the following post.

 

“I don’t think I’m ever going to get over the fact that Robocop was adapted into Saturday morning cartoon series…”

The post was spurred by a couple of factors. For one, I’ve been slowly doing research for an article I’m planning on writing soon about Pryde of the X-Men, and there is an anecdotal but ubiquitous bit of trivia about that cartoon involving Robocop that I know deep in my soul is completely false, but I don’t have the full concrete evidence to prove it. So, in my spare time I tend to do exhaustive google image searching to try and find animation model sheets from the Robocop animated series. In the latest search I stumbled upon a still from said animated series of Robo throttling Clarence Boddicker that looked like it was transferred directly from the original film. So I snagged that still, and the one from the original film to compare them. Second, like some people have resting bitch face, I have resting Robocop thoughts. So I took the side by side film and animation stills to Twitter and composed the half thought out post above, complete with the missing indefinite article “a” describing “Saturday morning cartoon”. That’s so me.

Fast forward to 48 hours later and the post has been liked over three thousand times, reposted almost 400 times, commented on over 200 times, and has been seen by roughly a quarter of a million people. By viral standards, this missive barely counts, but for two days straight my phone has been pinging me ever second or two to let me know that someone, somewhere in this wide world is interacting with my silly Robocop dispatch (well, it would be if I hadn’t turned off my notifications a couple years ago when I had a truly viral post about the existence of a Friendly’s branded cheese skirt burger, but that’s a story for never.) And I have some thoughts on the reverberations of a post like this.

First, foremost, and with the utmost nonchalance, OH MY GOD it was super gratifying. I would love to just write off this kind of social media experience as no big deal. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I’m just as addicted to the dopamine hit of anonymous likes and reposts as anyone, even though admittedly it’s all pretty pointless. I’m not trying to make bank off of my website or social media, I’ve long past stopped accepting “review materials” to write about, and my amazon associates account can barely be listed as providing beer & pizza money. I’m in this game to start and hopefully have conversations. So yes, it was cool that I nudged my way in front of a plethora of eyes this week, and ultimately had a couple of fun experiences along the way.

My main name-drop moment was that somehow this post floated past Steven de Souza, scriptwriter of some little independent films you may have heard of such as Die Hard, Die Hard 2: Die Harder, 48 Hours, and my personal favorite of the bunch, Commando. He chimed in with a response to my post that mentioned that the Rambo franchise was also adapted into a cartoon, to which I replied that my favorite episode of the Rambo animated series was the one where John Rambo befriends a killer whale and the two team up to take down a bunch of terrorists. I provided a link to an old piece I wrote about the episode on my former site, Branded in the 80s, for good measure, not thinking that de Souza would click on it, let alone read my goofy article. But he did, and came back later that evening to let me know that he enjoyed the piece. Are we BFFs now making plans to get together over dinner to chat about how sad it is that Commando never had an animated series even though there was a toy line made for the film? No. But again, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it was pretty damn cool to even spend a couple of minutes chatting with de Souza.

Speaking of the Rambo cartoon, the next observation I wanted to bring up about the barely viral Robocop tweet is that out of the 200 plus comments that the post received, at least 60% of them was just to say that Rambo was an 80s cartoon staple as well. And that the Toxic Avenger got one in 1991. And Police Academy. And Conan the Barbarian. Now, I appreciate the sentiment, and I tried to start up a conversation with the first few responses to let them know that not only did I realize this, but that I even wrote an article on this very subject for the Strange Kids Club Magazine over a decade ago. Not that I expected them to have read that piece; it was for more of a “we have a common interest in R-rated movies adapted into cartoons, and would you like to chat about that” kind of a thing. But those replies just kept coming. And coming. And does no body ever click on a Twitter post they’re engaging with to check and see if anyone else has shared the sentiment before them? I’m fastidious about doing just this for fear of seeming tone deaf. But my assumption is that these kinds of posts from folks one doesn’t follow are like seeing some crazy thing out of their car window on a long road trip. They roll down their window and shout “Rambo Too!!!!!” and then drive on by. And I totally get that. It’s not how I typically use the platform, which is to curate a group of like-minded individuals that I try to focus what little attention I can give to the platform in order to try and have some online friends. I don’t randomly scroll the “For You” tab, and sorry to say, I mute all reposts on the folks I follow. I’m just not there for that experience.

That being said, I’ve noticed over the years that no matter what the number of “followers” is that I have, there is a rotating core of about 20 to 30 mutuals who will engage with the stuff I post. Which is amazing. It’s amazing and humbling that anyone does to be frank. I suck at making friends, and the first couple of times we meet in person, if we ever do, I can guarantee that I will be awkward. I’m either weirdly quiet, or I get super excited when someone brings up something I know a bit about and I go from staring at my feet to grabbing them by both shoulders and telling them everything I know about the subject. “ED GEIN? Oh man, did you know that even though he’s classified as a serial killer he’s more of a ghoulish spree killer, though it’s not known for sure if he murdered members of his own family, and did you know that he never went to prison, just a mental hospital, and that there’s a dude who once bough Gein’s old Ford sedan, but it’s missing now, and…” So, buyer beware.

But the point I’m driving at, is that typically the first 10-20 likes or comments on one of my Twitter posts are typically by mutuals, and then after that it’s when it spreads to other accounts that either I don’t follow, or neither of us follow each other. In fact, having had four viral to viral-ish posts in my Twitter tenure, I can confidently say that if the first couple of engagements are not from mutuals, then that’s when I know that a post has some legs and will have more engagement. This kind of data fascinates me even though I’m not trying to take advantage of it. Similarly, there’s a pretty standard ratio that develops between the reposts and likes of about 10% re-posts per like. With the data that comes with a free Twitter account, it’s interesting too that even when a post goes viral, like the two million views, twenty-eight thousand likes, and two thousand reposts of my stupid cheese skit burger post, it garners nothing in return. All that visibility and engagement and zero accounts followed me. So, for all the folks out there that fret over not having a post go viral, don’t. It’s a weird aberration that makes it difficult to use the platform for a few days, and then almost exactly 48 hours later it all dissipates. The same goes for 28k, 3.4k, 160, or 20 likes. Just saying.

 

To get back to the Robocop-ness of this post, but to also talk a bit about the fact that a lot of strangers interacted with it, the last main thought I had on the experience over the last two days was that by having something related to a violent 80s film of kind of viral, it kind of sucks. You see, like I mentioned above, I try to have a very curated experience on Twitter. I’m not there to argue, get political, or change anyone’s ideas. I’m just there to make friends and talk about the junk that I love talking about. But the Venn diagram of folks who are into some of the things I love, versus me and my sensibilities can be weird. It’s no secret that there is a lot of gross stuff on Twitter. And by gross, I mean hatred, bigotry, sexism, bulling and, well if it’s horrible and makes people feel bad, it’s probably there in abundance. I block out most of that from my experience. Methodically. I literally block a lot of other folks. Anytime I see someone being gross I block them. Unless it’s someone I know in real life or have known for a long time online, in which case I’ll take my concern to offline chatting to see what’s up. But I have no time for gross crap online.

So, when I posted about Robocop, I unintentionally invited some of this into my purview. There are definitely folks who enjoy the film who aren’t jerks about it, and then some that get off on it. On the light side of things there were some folks who just suck at interacting with other humans, like all the time in their life I suspect, who left some abrupt comments that were slightly rude or judgmental. Like, there’s a distinct difference between “Hey, did you know there was a Rambo cartoon too?” and “Dude, no shit, Rambo got one too.” But then there’s the “Cuz in the 80s we weren’t lil pussies” or the derivative (and obviously copied because of timestamp) “Cuz the people in the 80s weren’t blind fun hating little pussies who were afraid of everything that actually built a spine”. Now there are a couple sides to this. On the surface, I don’t like being used as a trampoline for dumb ignorant statements like this, and it’s been an ongoing issue of Twitter whether it’s the modern quote-post or the old school screenshot-reference post. The idea of take another tweet, filtering it through a hateful lens and then inviting your own followers to the part instead of just engaging with the original post is so weird to me. I’ve seen it used to bully friends who had corrected a falsehood or assumption, and I see it used a lot to twist a post into something that was clearly unintended by the original.

But on the other side, is the idea that the gross statement was a comment on my original post. Am I the “lil pussy” who they assume is aghast at the idea that such an ultraviolent movie would have been adapted into a kid’s show? I’m not, but I’m not writing this to defend myself from an apparent passive aggressive attack on social media. If it is, why not have the guts to just say that directly? I mean, it’s still gross and stupid, but it would show some of that “spine” that one of them so eloquently stated. Either way, I really don’t like being associated with it, and it’s not a “they can’t act that way on Twitter” thing either, it’s just dumb and rude. What good comes of it? One of those reposts garnered a similar engagement to my original post, but as I’ve illustrated above, so what. What good comes of it? It’s like high school bullshit at best. My only hope, for my own amusement, is that these folks aren’t just like this hiding behind the anonymity online. I hope they interject into conversations with strangers in stores or in waiting rooms when they overhear something that stokes their ire. Also, just in case, this isn’t to raise folks to my defense either. I just feel it’s important or hopefully at least interesting to see the downside of a post hitting.

My overall takeaway from these experiences? Cheese Skirt Burgers are hilarious. Commando not getting an animated series is a tragedy.