Robocop: Alpha Commando

No one seems to have much info about this series, but it existed quite a while ago in syndication. Someone was bound to remember this series, and that someone was I. I remember “Robocop”, the animated series. It was even nominated for an Emmy, but it seems to have faded into obscurity. You’ll see this often in my columns, me spotlighting “lost” shows. I don’t have much info about this animated series, but I do have a complete collection of episodes (okay, so I’m missing one episode or two).

The show was about . . . well, if you don’t know what the movie “Robocop” was about, then I can’t really help you. Well, wait. Maybe I can. The animated series was about Alex Murphy, who is not really Alex Murphy. He is a cyborg of sorts, more machine than man. And, he’s a cop with a partner--Nancy Minor, who in turn has an 11-year old, Matt. Together, they fight (or fought) wacky villains on the streets of Detroit.

New Detroit, that is. You see, it’s the near (very near) future, in 2030--thereof. There’s actually 300 million+ living in the United States. I doubt that we’ll be as high-tech as “Robocop” insists we’ll be, but we should be making advances at an astonishing rate. Anyway, crime has advanced, too. And, it’s up to the team of Murphy and Minor, nail ‘em and jail ‘em, to clean house!

Corny, corn, and more corn. If you couldn’t tell by the above paragraph that this stylishly-animated series was super-corn made by senior-citizens, then I guess I’m gonna have to spell it out for you. Whoever wrote the scripts for this series should go to some more writing workshops, because (on some episodes) the writing was shockingly poor. Consider this one-liner, said by Robocop’s chief-tech scientist, Cornelius Neumier: “You’re ‘burned’ out, eh Robocop? Guess I’ll have to fix some circuits in you.” My God in heaven.

But, there were a few standout episodes. I really liked a particular episode that centered on Murphy’s partner, Nancy Minor, who double-crossed Murphy. Or, did she? The viewer did not immediately know that Robocop’s partner went south, and even after the viewer found out that Robocop was being set up, the viewer didn’t know why until the very end of the episode, when it was revealed that while Robocop was in Neumier’s lab receiving maintenance, Minor was kidnapped and replaced with a look-alike. For some inexplicable reason, I’m always a sucker for these types of plots, even though they aren’t very coherent and this one was no exception. If you went plot-hole hunting you’d likely find a couple of Atlantic-Ocean-sized gaps in the narrative. But being that this really was the very definition of what a “cartoon” is, you can’t hold that fact against the creators. It’s very hard to do a “conspiracy” episode and not pull some kind of a fast resolution--like a deus ex machina--in favor of a long, drawn out resolution that works logically, in all areas.

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