{"id":175181,"date":"2025-12-04T18:19:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-04T18:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/175181\/"},"modified":"2025-12-04T18:19:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T18:19:08","slug":"detroit-now-has-its-robocop-like-philadelphia-has-its-rocky-balboa-statue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/175181\/","title":{"rendered":"Detroit now has its RoboCop like Philadelphia has its Rocky Balboa statue"},"content":{"rendered":"

DETROIT – He\u2019s finally serving and protecting his beloved city. After nearly 15 years in the making, Detroit\u2019s massive, bronze RoboCop statue<\/a> is now permanently on display.<\/p>\n

The 11-foot tall, 2.5 ton sculpture now stands at Detroit\u2019s Eastern Market outside of Free Age Production Studio at 2934 Russell Street just south of Mack.<\/p>\n

Construction crews quietly spent the last few weeks laying the foundation and completing construction on a cold, windy, snowy evening last night, Wednesday, December 4.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love it,\u201d Jim Toscano, owner of Free Age Production Studio told MLive as he stood in the frigid outdoors marveling at the statue after it went up yesterday. \u201cIt looks great, it\u2019s super impressive and it has already brought a lot of nice people around.\u201d<\/p>\n

Toscano says it took about three years to work out all of the details and once the green light was given to put the statue in front of his company, it went up quickly over the last few weeks and people have already started flocking to it.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone is just checking it out and having fun. It\u2019s snowing, it\u2019s cold, and it\u2019s dark, but there has still been a steady stream of people already stopping by to see it.\u201d<\/p>\n

This large statue has been around 15 years in the making<\/a>. That\u2019s when someone posted on Twitter asking Detroit\u2019s Mayor at the time, Dave Bing, why Detroit didn\u2019t have a RoboCop statue when Philadelphia had one of Rocky.<\/p>\n

Filmmaker Brandon Walley and Jerry Paffendorf, co-founder and CEO of Loveland Technologies, saw that and started a Kickstarter campaign which raised tens of thousands of dollars.<\/p>\n

Years later, Venus Bronze Works in Detroit constructed the statue. After that, it simply sat in storage at Eastern Market with plans to publicly display it.<\/p>\n

It took so many years for this to happen for a myriad of reasons including legal issues needing to be finalized with MGM and more money needing to be raised for the foundation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had to get the exact model made. That model had to be blown up to over a 10-foot mold. That happened in Vancouver, and Idaho. That took years. Then, the owner of Venus Bronze Works went through a cancer scare. That was two more years,\u201d Brandon Walley told MLive.<\/p>\n

And as you can see, the RoboCop statue does not carry a weapon. We\u2019re told the idea was to build it to be a friendly neighborhood RoboCop without a gun.<\/p>\n

Now that the statue is up, Walley says there are plans to do a big ceremony and celebration after this winter and \u201cRoboCop\u201d star, Peter Weller, will be invited.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DETROIT – He\u2019s finally serving and protecting his beloved city. After nearly 15 years in the making, Detroit\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":175182,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-175181","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}