Jon Davison - Producer:
"We have one of the all star teams for Special Effects. We have Phil Tippett, Academy Award Winner, doing all of the stop-motion aniamtion on the robot ED-209, this large, armoured enforcement robot. And he becomes RoboCop's nemesis during the course of the film. And I think Phil Tippett, with ED-209, has really also done a superb robot."

Phil:
"Stop-motion animation is a frame-by-frame process where we move the stop-motion model, the arms, the legs, the feet, the tail, the eyes, the back, very infinitesimal amounts and then we take one frame of film and repeat the process again. Take one frame of film, repeat the process, take one frame of film."

FLESH AND STEEL

Describing ED-209:

Ed Neumeier - Screenwriter, co-producer:
"ED-209 was supposed to look like these kinda weird Japanese toys that were these big robots that had gun arms, and I just said 'It looks something like that.'
I always had this idea that it had a shark mouth and had these double machine guns and it looked like... What do you call it? The gun pods and the rocket pods you saw on the side of Huey attack 'copters."

Phil:
There's like a certain dumbness to it as well, a utilitarian stupidity to the thing."

Paul Verhoeven - Director:
"I felt that basically having this kind of feeling there might be sensors here, but what does he see exactly? He's partially blind, blind for what's happening in the world. Law enforcement has a side that's blind, and basically will just do like the Germans did in the Second World War. When the commanding officer says 'Shoot these people', they would just do it."

Paul Sammon - RoboCop expert:
"You've got something that looks really swell and in ED-209's case it does look ferocious and it does look intimidating, which was intentionally built in to it but it doesn't operate. It doesn't work very well."

Craig Hayes - ED-209 creator:
"Automobiles get styled to be emotionally appealing, and it's kind of strange that military equipment gets a little bit of that same treatment."

Phil:
"The front grille on ED's face for the longest time was the opposite way it is now. It looked like he had a smile. We knew something was wrong with it, 'Oh yeah. If we turn the grille upside down, he has a menacing presence'."
Paul Sammon - RoboCop expert:
"What is that grille? You wouldn't put a big radiator on the face of a tank. You might as well paint a bull's-eye around it and say 'Hit me here'."

Working with props:

Jost Vacano - Director of photography:
"What we were shooting was just a prop, but it couldn't really act."

Jon Davison - Producer:
"People had to go up to it, or stand next to it, or touch it. That was the prop."

Craig Hayes - ED-209 creator:
"Paul Verhoeven, he was screaming. Every time the robot was supposed to be moving, he would act it out. He would run through the movements and stuff. If people weren't afraid of a giant prop, they were certainly afraid of him."

Stop-motion:

Jost Vacano - Director of photography:
"At that time there were no computer-generated images, this was just stop-motion."

Paul Verhoeven - Director:
"I didn't know anything about stop-motion. I had no idea. I forgot for a long time that I had to solve that too."

Phil:
"There really wasn't a lot of money to work with, so we couldn't get in to really any fancy bluescreen photography. The only way at that time of creating these artificial characters was either putting a guy in a suit, or building a big prop or doing a stop-motion animation puppet.
The process of rear-screen photography, which is what we used on RoboCop, you shoot a photographic background plate and project it on to a translucent screen. You build a stage, put your stop-motion puppet in front of that, light that puppet so that it matches the background, and have any foreground objects you need to and shoot that."

ED-209, the actor:

Ed Neumeier - Screenwriter, co-producer:
"Phil is like another actor, he delivers another performance, and ED-209 was always to me kind of the clown.
The whole gag of falling down the stairs, people find that so amusing, that he can't go down the stairs. I think it wouldn't have been as funny if Phil hadn't been there to... There's a shot where the thing is reaching, it's going... [feeling] And that's Phil."

Craig Hayes - ED-209 creator:
"We actually built a scale version of the stairs, got all the dimensions and whatnot from the staircase that they were using, and matched the paint and sruff, and built a miniature set, probably about four feet square. The we bascially set the puppet up at the top of the stairs and flipped him down the stairs."

RoboMotion:

Jon Davison - Producer:
"There is, I believe, one, possibly two, stop-motion shots of RoboCop."

Craig Hayes - ED-209 creator:
"When you have RoboCop right in front, he used a little miniature guy. He had to help push up the gun and blow his arm off."

Funny:

Phil:
"The final scene, where ED-209 walks in from off-camera, I got a call from Davison, and Jon said 'Can you do something funny?'. So we backed some stuff off and found this little fan, and glued that on to ED-209 and kept the stupid little whirligig spinning the whole time, in a pretty much pantomime drunk gag, where he hiccups and then he... [sounds] He falls over and does this little... [death gasp]"

Details:
RoboCop
RoboCop 2
RoboCop 3