Whether or not you’re excited, or even mildly intrigued, about the RoboCop remake coming to theaters this week one thing is for certain. It can’t be any worse than some of the other RoboCop-related spin-offs floating around out there like so much rectal flotsam from the anal cavity of Hollywood. Take, for instance, Orion Pictures’ 1998 animated series RoboCop: Alpha Commando. The short-lived Alpha Commado, which featured some of the same writers as the 1980s animated series, not only premiered a good five years after the last film but it also had virtually nothing to do with either the movies or prior TV series.
The plot is cheesily simple enough, as RoboCop is brought back online after a five year (imagine that!) siesta to help a federal crime task force called “Alpha Division” battle the forces of DARC (something about Anarchy and Chaos). All of the characters from previous RoboCop canon are completely absent and even his wife and son have different names (which is later explained as some sort of witness protection thing). Adding to the general weirdness, RoboCop is now jam-packed with various gadgets like a glue gun, lasers, a parachute, grappling hook and roller blades (just to name a few). He’s also, apparently, programmed to make bad puns when in the face of danger… basically they turn him into Inspector Gadget 2.0.
Episodes generally featured RoboCop and his new partner, Agent Nancy Miner, fighting off the regular assortment of Saturday morning thugs, evil scientists, robots or weird mutants. None of them stand out as remarkably memorable with exception, perhaps, to Episode 4 (Doppleganger) in which Dr. Anais Gaia makes a rapidly-aging clone of Alex Murphy who then has to face off against an out-of-control RoboCop. Things get less interesting when the clone grows old enough to need a cane (he’s no Bruce Wayne), but there’s a nugget of a story in there somewhere.
The series was cancelled only a few months later and that was about it for Alpha Commando. Despite being syndicated on Hulu these days, the only thing this series really left behind is this laughable intro and theme song which remarkably only had one word in to: RoboCop (presumably just in case what you were about to watch). Not since Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos has an intro ever been this conceited. I mean, it did single-handedly take down MGM’s Animation Division…
