Robocop Melts Down at Fan Expo in New Orleans

Peter Weller as Robocop

Peter Weller’s memories of the 1987 blockbuster were delivered with a strong note of disdain.

In a famous 1986 Saturday Night Live sketch, an exasperated William Shatner told fans at a science fiction convention to get a life. Friday night at Fan Expo, actor Peter Weller more or less called out the whole enterprise as well. He walked into the interview focused on 1987’s Robocop, looked at the crowd and belligerently asked, “How many people are here? Twelve?”

He hadn’t yet taken off his coat or beret and didn’t, which certainly made it feel as though he didn’t intend to stay. The moderator for the session tried to get things started on a genial note, but Weller ignored her and told the audience—realistically, 30 to 40 people—that the way this was going to work was that they would ask the questions, he’d answer them and when they were out of questions, he was out of there. The challenging tone of voice made it clear what he’d prefer they do, and as if to prove the point, he announced pre-emptively that the Robocop suit weighed 50 pounds, cutting off that avenue of questioning. He said that if we really wanted to know about Robocop, we’d be better off watching RoboDoc: The Creation of Robocop, where he learned a lot about the making of the movie.

A brave fan thanked him for coming, but even that was wrong. Weller said he came to New Orleans to see his buddy Rick and that he would have been here anyway. When the fan finally asked a question, it was about his voice acting work in the animated adaptation of The Dark Knight Returns. Weller promptly dismissed voice acting as not real, though he did speak highly of artist Frank Miller, who wrote and drew the comic the cartoon was based on. Not even Miller escaped unscathed, though. Weller said Miller wrote the Robocop 2 script but that it wasn’t his best work.

Weller’s performance at Fan Expo was awesome in a way. His rambling, confrontational delivery did say good things about Robocop director Paul Verhoeven, whom he credited for everything that made the movie memorable. He also told us about his buddy Rick, who’s good at golf and just about everything.

As Weller rambled through his dismissive attempts to talk about Robocop when he’d clearly rather be almost anywhere else, he came off as the guy who wondered how his career got to a place where he was doing comic conventions on a Friday and took out his frustration on us. Here was an Actors School-trained Broadway actor being celebrated for a role where he played a robot—not Murphy, he told us, because “Robo” didn’t know who Murphy was until the end of the film. It was perversely fun to see that cliché brought to life and, like Shatner on SNL, question the whole convention concept.

After a while though, it simply wasn’t fun and since I like Weller in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, I didn’t need to hang around until he spoiled that, whether by being a dick or dumping on the movie. As unscheduled performance art, his appearance was brilliant, but like a lot of performance art, a little went a long way.

The guest before Weller was the opposite. Dante Basco played a Lost Boy in Steven Spielberg’s 1991 film Hook, but for the purposes of most of the attendees of his panel, he is the voice of Zuko on the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender and the title character on American Dragon: Jake Long. Unlike Weller, he was there to connect with the audience. He spoke its cultural language, talking about Tumblr as his online on-ramp and Twitch as the place where he might first watch M. Night Shyamalan’s live action version of The Last Airbender so fans could join him on a watch-along.

Unlike Weller, he seemed to welcome audience interaction, and when Basco wondered why companies do live action versions of animated series—most recently, One Piece—but not animated versions of live action shows, he invited the fans to shout out live action movies they would like to see animated. The moderator felt that the official answer had been reached when someone shouted, “Oppenheimer.”

Although I spent most of my night at celebrity panels, they are beside the point at Fan Expo. The stars bring in fans, but I suspect the chance to meet them for autographs and photos is more of a draw than hearing them talk, the moments that actually connect the fans and their favorite stars.

Fan Expo at its core is a site for a celebration of fandom as an activity, and the fans themselves are the real draw and the real stars. They want to be around others like them who share their passions so much that they’ve made costumes only other true fans will get. You can question their priorities as the SNL sketch did years ago, but their fandom is a lot warmer and more inviting than Peter Weller’s truth.