“Iconic” can be an overused word, but with film marketing imagery & poster design from the 70’s & 80’s, you can’t really avoid using the term often, and with justification. And “iconic” can’t be used much more justifiably than it is with the poster for RoboCop.
Probably the best Judge Dredd movie Hollywood will ever make, RoboCop is not only exciting, satirical, hilarious, aggressive, & smart, but is practically the poster boy for “iconic” - literally. Murphy stepping out of his OCP cop car is indelible imagery, as visceral & memorable as anything in the film itself - and that’s before you add in “that” logo font, the knowing & unashamedly corporate copy, and that essential design glue, layout. No other film poster can ever do anything similar, because it will simply look “like RoboCop”. No band or comic can use that pose for a cover or splash page, unless they intentionally want to tip their hat to RoboCop. That one single, kinetic & ambiguous pose of Murphy - is it a hero getting in the car, riding into the night? Or a threat stepping out, a potentially lethal embodiment of brutal law - belongs forever & inextricably to RoboCop. It’s a poster which created one of the most iconic images in modern cinema.
Who made it? Well, appropriately for RoboCop, it may not have been OCP but it was something equally as venal - it was Marketing. The dreaded Marketing. Home of 99% of the worlds’ cultural stupidity, home of decision (and, even worse, design) by compromise & committee, natural champion of the Lowest Common Denominator, and a breeding ground for buzzwords, bullshit, hype & mediocrity. Marketing, of course, sits in the glare of the half-vicious, half-joshing satire of Robocop; who doesn’t remember those superb world-building commercials? “I’d buy that for a dollar!”, like so much of the film, was iconic in itself. Then there was the “American tradition” of the 6000 SUX - not just a comment on America’s love of new, large, inefficient & ugly cars, but parodying a real new car from one of Ford’s realworld competitors. The central premise of the film uses & abuses Marketing, of course. With a private company running the police force for profit, the genesis for the ED209 & Robocop programs is rooted firmly with the marketeers & their ambitious, amoral executives.
Yet it was faceless, soulless Marketing that gave us this most iconic of film images. It’s not hard to see why, tho. If there’s one thing Marketing knows, it knows its own, and that world is at the core of RoboCop’s story. The Robocop poster would have been a gift to a talented designer in the wasteland of Marketing - not only does it have to sell the film, but it actually works as part of the fiction; how else would you sell a real RoboCop, at that time in history, in a setup like the one in the film, except by announcing “THE FUTURE OF LAW ENFORCEMENT” with a bullhorn & the irony dials firmly set at nought.
They also understood, as Marketing would, that The Car’s The Star. Or, in this case, the superior example of Detroit engineering that dwarfs the automobile. Look how big Murphy is - completely uncropped, owning the whole central third of the poster, the OCP cruiser & abstract background lights merely framing for Robocop’s massive form. Even that superb, stern & forthright copy sits warily to one side as it steps out - one crushing metal foot serving as an emphatic & unequivocal fullstop to its own name & seller’s strapline.
Ah yes. The name on the poster. Or more precisely, that font. Exactly as it should be, “RoboCop” is a logo. If they’d had any longer to think about it, it would have become a brand, and it betrays a touch of genius. As a typeface, the RoboCop title font is painfully trying to be “futuristic”, and dates itself as a result. It’s ugly, ostentatious, humourless & weighty.. but forged as a logo, it’s amazing, it’s trying hard not to smirk at you, it’s incredibly self-aware, and - perhaps most importantly, like all the best film logos - it manges to encapsulate something of the film in its form. It’s hard to nail down, but there’s a quality to that “RoboCop” logo which shows that the people who created it cared about the film, and what it said. It was the perfect fit for the film, for the same reasons as the copy, and the image.
After all that, I have to admit what you’ve already realised - it wasn’t really some generic, stereotypical “Marketing” strawman that created this poster. It was, as I’ve said, people (albiet faceless) who cared, who had talent, who did a brilliant piece of work. It was designers at B.D. Fox Independent. Who, by the way, also designed the poster for the 1989 Batman (one of the world’s really, REALLY iconic logos given reverent & loving treatment). They also created the posters for E.T.; Halloween; Cronenberg’s The Fly; Spinal Tap; In Bed With Madonna;Memphis Belle (which they seemingly approached as a bratpack movie group shot, but with flight jackets & a fucking great plane in the background); Beetlejuice; Bill & Ted. The list goes on. The point is that, far from being the 99% talentshy Marketing cockmonkeys, in & around the 1980’s B.D. Fox clearly had creatives on the books who knew what they were doing.
Genuinely, I believe that even just the RoboCop logo, never mind the whole poster, is up there with those of Ghostbusters, Star Wars & Back To The Future as a handful of the most truly iconic logos in cinematic art design - ones that stand on their own as instant signifiers of their films, away from any associated imagery, and will never need revising or reworking*. I also wonder if, like those logo designs, that “RoboCop” was also one of the most last minute iconic logos of all time. If you look back over the published design development of those other films, you see some terrible, of-their-time fonts & logos used throughout development - some often approved for the longest time, not simply trials or placeholders - and then only shortly before release did the now accepted “classic” logos come into existence, finally capturing some aspect or other of the films for which they have become a kind of iconographic shorthand. I have no way of knowing, but I suspect that final RoboCop logo would have had the same 11th hour genesis.
So anyway. A tip of the chrome dome to Marketing, the unnamed designers of B.D. Fox, and the producers, of RoboCop - who judged exactly the tone of the film, recognised exceptional work when it was presented to them, and gave one of modern cinema’s most iconic films an equally potent & iconic poster.
*Postscript - All three Robocop films have been released as a Bluray boxset. Some clueless modern marketing moron thought they should “have a go” at the logo and artwork. Hey, guess what? It SUX.
