The Science Experiment

Who doesn’t love robots? They’re scary, they’re powerful, and they’re intelligent. They’re frickin’ cool, is the long and short of it. And robots fighting?! That’s off the charts, as they say.

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Robot of the Week: Ed-209

Wednesday, March 7th, 2007

Image:Ed-209.jpg

The Enforcement Droid Series 209 (or ED-209) is a fictional law enforcement robot featured as one of the design and special effect highlights of the movie RoboCop (1987), and its two sequels. ED-209 serves as a heavily-armed obstacle and foil to RoboCop’s title character and others throughout the series, as well as a source of comic relief due to its tendency to malfunction. It remains an often referenced and lampooned fixture of American popular culture.

Featured V I D E O:
Real-Life ED-209!

Armaments

The ED-209’s primary weapon in all films are three 20mm machine guns, two on the left arm and one on the right arm. It also featured a three-round rocket launcher on its right arm and twin launchers for mortar rounds or gas grenades behind its head. The grenade launchers are never used on film, but are shown on models and schematics of the ED-209.
The ED-209 was designed by Craig Davies, who also built the full size models, and animated by Phil Tippett, a veteran stop-motion animator. Davies and Tippett would go on to collaborate on many more projects. As one of the set pieces of the movie, the ED-209’s look and animated sequences were under the close supervision of director Paul Verhoeven.

Design

Director Paul Verhoeven made it clear very early on that ED-209 should not look “cute”. He wanted the robot to look hard and mean. For this reason, various common robot features were left out. There are no eyes on the ED-209, for instance, since Craig Davies believed they conveyed too much emotion as well as being cliché.

Craig Davies also incorporated his ideas about modern 1980s American design, especially car design, into the robot. He envisioned futuristic designers making the robot look good in order to make it marketable before they made it work well, “just like an American car”. There is also commentary on ridiculous corporate design policies, with such features as an obviously over-designed hydraulic system, over-attention paid to cosmetics and the placement of obviously vulnerable features such as the radiator grill on the very front of the robot.The audio for the ED-209 was composed by Stephen Flick and John Pospisil of audio effects company Screaming Lizard. The hydraulic heavy machinery feel of the robot was composed of various motor and piston noises. An intimidating growl produced by ED-209 in the first movie was created by playing a jaguar growl backwards. Its distorted human voice was recorded by the film’s executive producer Jon Davison. It was never intended to be in RoboCop’s theatrical release and was only recorded for an initial screening. However, it was kept as the voice of ED-209 all the way to the theaters.

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