Robocop: Your move, creep

Even before the first Robocop film was released in the late 1980s, there were comparisons between the title character and Judge Dredd, who had already been around for 10 years. There were the hidden eyes, the short bursts of extreme violence and the unbending devotion to the law. And it's not hard to find comparisons between the dialogue in the movie and comic, with some of Dredd's most iconic lines reproduced word for word in the film.

But the similarities go deeper than that, and far beyond the business end of the characters' spectacular weapons. It's in the cities themselves, and how they play a vital part in the stories.

It's always been arguable that the main character in Judge Dredd isn't the lawman himself, but Mega-City One, and Dredd is just the straight man to the future-shocked population, and the trends and culture that permeate it. Judge Joe Dredd usually emerges from the big mega-epics as relatively the same character, but the city is often changing.

Likewise, the Detroit of Robocop is just as rich and textured. You understand the people who live there, and how they cope with the endless crime and despair. Through the use of the incomparable news segments, and even the ongoing repetition of the 'I'd buy that for a dollar' guy, future Detroit feels like a character as rich as Murphy himself.

Despite some later ham-fisted attempts to flesh out the city, this focus on Detroit was lost in later movies, TV shows and comic books, and it's not a coincidence that none of the later Robocops ever match that original. They've moved on, and left that crime-stricken city behind.