Getting there from here
It began with a joke tweet sent by a self-described “Random dude from Massachusetts” to the mayor of Detroit. Within 8 days, a grassroots effort had raised $60,000 in funds from 2,100 backers worldwide for a statue honoring Robocop. On the surface, the event itself might seem like a fluke, a joke gone wild, and a sad statement on our priorities, but a confluence of factors suggests that this cyborg from the future may be a harbinger of things to come.
Why did it work?
Ideas flow on Twitter all the time, and this one might have ended at “Mayor Rejects Robocop Joke”, but there were key reasons that enabled the stirrings of productive nostalgia to drive a campaign that took off: savvy leaders, a trusted platform, and a mix of local viability and worldwide appeal.
Crowd-Experienced, Media-Savvy Leaders
First, the torch was quickly picked up by a group with plenty of crowdsourcing experience. This organization, a Detroit non-profit called Imagination Station , operates at the intersection of art, technology, and urban development with projects such as the re-purposing of abandoned lots into design spaces. Their affiliates have a track record of innovative ideas, including Loveland, a project by Jerry Paffendorf to sell land in Detroit by the inch with the purpose of creating park-like visitable “microhoods” around the city. This experience means they knew what kind of platform would work best for this project, how to pitch it in a serious yet compelling way, and how to deal with the inevitable media attention.
Almost in parallel, another entity had taken notice of the campaign – a California company named Omni Consumer Products. In an interesting twist, the company, which was named after a fictional one in Robocop, is in the business of ”licensing, defictionalization, and reverse-branding” (including such products as Stay-Puft marshmellows and the Tru Blood beverage). OCP stepped in with a matching donation which allowed the campaign to work much faster than it otherwise would have.
A Trustworthy, Efficient Platform
The fundraising mechanism itself was a platform called Kickstarter which is specifically designed for funding creative projects. On Kickstarter, anyone can post project pitches, including a description and a funding goal, and through its platform have a way to collect pledges that will become effective when the set goal is met. This kind of contingent escrow system helps solve the difficult coordination task of raising money from thousands of people and its reputation (as well as its partnership with Amazon Payments) provides a degree of trust. The platform has successfully funded several interesting projects in the recent past, ranging from urban food systems and innovative desk stands to Facebook challenger Diaspora and media projects such as short films or music videos.
“Part Man, Part Machine, All Crowd-Funded” - photo via elbragon
One interesting thing is the mix of successful projects – some come from virtual unknowns who are able to construct an attractive pitch while others are from creative producers with long resumes. The Robocop pitch combines several elements that make it compelling – a credible organization with a local presence as a booster, a short viral video, the “random dude tweet” element, information on where the statue could be placed, and leads on who might actually make it. All of this reinforced the notion that although the initial tweet might have been a joke, the project was serious.
Local Involvement Meets Worldwide Passion
News of the project spread quickly, with local, national, and international media picking up on the story. Some media reports and online discussions revealed a misunderstanding of how the funding approach worked. Some assumed the campaign was a petition to ask Detroit’s government to fund the statue, while others thought that the money mainly came from Detroit and thought it could be better spent. Reaction from the Detroit area was mixed. Some shared the view of one Detroit Free-Press columnist who wrote:
The skepticism from Detroit is understandable. It’s a proud city that is working hard on reinventing itself at a time when some continue to see it as a lost cause or as a source of what critics call “ruin porn”, the striking images of a grand era lost. The fact that the project is being funded to a large degree by outsiders who want to honor a fictional character from an action movie which was filmed 1,000 miles away is not lost on critics. The Economist admits that it “may seem like a cruel practical joke played on the struggling city by heartless nerds“ even as it considers that the project could be a sign of hope.
This might have been in the movie, had Robocop not been filmed in Dallas – photo via dexxus
As the original tweet pointed out, the Robocop statue would join the Rocky statue in Philadelphia, the Fonz statue in Milwaukee, and the Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore statue) in Minneapolis in honoring fictional characters, but their own track record is convoluted. The Rocky statue was funded by Stallone and has moved around several times, while the Mary Richards and Fonz statues have been funded by a mix of local tourism boosters and the TV Land network, which have led to criticism of marketing complicity alongside the ”it’s like honoring a unicorn” remarks. In Robocop‘s case, two things are different – first, the 2,000+ worldwide funders are evidence of a heartfelt fan desire to see the statue built, and second, the organizers went made an effort to channel part of the the enthusiasm generated by the campaign towards directly beneficial local initiatives such as Robocharity that direct funds to food kitchens, which ended up raising 10,000 meals for Detroit’s hungry.
The Latent Draw of The Past and the Imagined
As Don Draper famously remarked, “Nostalgia – it’s delicate, but potent…’nostalgia’ literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.” The dialog came from a Mad Men screenwriter, but it brings to mind the power of things past, real or imagined. It’s true that the Robocop issue is more about the alternate universe of our memories than it is about the real one.
Fictionalized cities tend to overpower even the most compelling real ones. The tourist tendency for preferring the familiar to the unknown explains the existence, even in a city such as New York with fantastic “real” attractions and cuisine, of both the cottage industry of movie site tours and the popularity of the Times Square Olive Garden. Yet there are signs that the Robocop case is about more than familiarity. For a generation of geeks who grew up at just the right time, Robocop was an inspirational allegorical figure. The influence is worldwide – there was a brief controversy last year in the Mexico City as to whether “Robocop” was an allowable name for children. One South American fan wrote:
). why? cos it was all i knew about detroit. and, because as a youngling (im 33 now) he was my hero. robocop its not about detroit being a fcked up city, or about corrupt police force. its about a man, turned into a cyborg, wiped his memories, and still he finds the way to be the outstanding cop he was, and a good human being. the one he used to be.The pop culture side of the nostalgia industry is sizable. $191 billion a year goes into licensing fees applied towards making everything from Transformers lunchboxes to Harry Potter eye patches. Today, a lot of that goes into disposable trinkets which will end up in the trash within weeks if not days by kids with short attention spans.
Of course, not everyone threw away their Thundercats lunchbox, and there are those who continue to be fiercely devoted to ephemera, even to the point of collecting an authentic replica of the ice from the Titanic movie (which no doubt is a faithful reproduction of the ice from 1912). In recent history, collectors of such items were seen as socially suspect, but the mainstreaming of geek culture is unearthing untapped potential for people to rediscover early influences or to join in communal celebrations of pop culture affinity (notice how Comic-Con 2011 sold out its 120,000+ spaces in less than a day).
Some of the more innovative companies in the segment include companies making fake brands real or bringing defunct brands back from the dead. In several cases, the companies in this business (including the aforementioned OCP) make it a point to show that they are actually producing high quality consumables and not simply gag gifts.
In this context, the power of the Robocop project is that it was able to draw on this nostalgia wave and channel it into something more productive than the usual pop culture throwaways. Surely very few of the over 2,000 contributors have a Robocop figurine on their coffee table. If a movie studio tried to sell them one for a dollar (!), they might see it as a piece of junk even if they loved the movie. Yet if their $1 can be channeled in an incremental way towards something executed by fellow fans in a tasteful way that serves as public art, encourages tourism, and also directly aids a local community, that makes for a much more compelling pitch and a more productive use of resources.
The Robocop project turns a shard of nostalgia into a visible, shared, and arguably useful entity.
Location, Location, Location
Traveling to sites evocative of cultural works is as old as ancient Romans visiting Greece, but one of its offshots is what some today call pop culture tourism. It’s a mixed bag, ranging from the cheap thrills of Roswell or the flash of Graceland to carefully crafted theme parks. Some “synthesized” locations are tending towards high-quality and expensive. A wave of interest in more authentic experiences is pushing intellectual property owners themselves to be more careful about the quality of their licensed properties, as can be seen in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter park, which has held up to significant fan scrutiny.
Unfortunately, it looks totally different from the inside – photo via eqqman Many more locations have come about through accidents, be it matching a location shot, matching a town name, matching a birthplace, or even matching a phone number. Some of these accidents have provided a handsome windfall for the lucky custodians of these sites, ranging from incidental locales such as Tom’s Restaurant in New York City, to full-fledged franchise-starters such as the Cheers Bar “When Glen Charles asked the owner to shoot initial exterior and interior shots the owner agreed, charging $1. He has since gone on to make millions, licensing the pub’s image and selling a variety of Cheers memorabilia, making the Bull & Finch the 42nd busiest outlet in the American food and beverage industry in 1997.”
An issue with these locations, as with businesses explicitly geared towards memorabilia such as Planet Hollywood, is that they inevitably veer towards the gawky and cheap, and some of them only superficially resemble their famous counterparts. Their current owners often only grudgingly accept the significance of their site. Some locations are more authentically and non-commercially restored and up-kept by a small group or a family (see the Field of Dreams, for example) but struggle in the end.
There are some amazing stories of dedicated individuals working to make the locations of cherished memories real. One San Diego man spent $150,000 on a house in Cleveland which had been used in the movie A Christmas Story. He restored the house to look as it did in the film and turned it into what is now a popular museum. In an interesting twist, he funded the house purchase through proceeds from selling a “leg-lamp” memorabilia replica item from the same movie.
The plentiful availability of downtown real estate in Detroit made the Robocop project work particularly well. If the price is too high and the location is too incidental, then the dynamics don’t work. The house in Highland Park, IL that was featured in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off has been up for sale for a while, but in the short term its million-dollar price tag (and zoning regulations, no doubt) makes it an unlikely candidate for a museum despite its affiliation with a much-loved movie and the news articles around the world regarding its sale.
Finally we come to the curious case of Forks, Washington, the setting of the Twilight series. Forks would have been just another small town in the Pacific Northwest, except it receives more than 70,000 fans a year, a significant contingent being teenagers dragging their parents to the small town.
Forks was chosen sight unseen by author Stephanie Meyer as the setting of her book series based on its high annual rainfall, and locations in the town don’t necessarily resemble the ones in the books or the movies, but that hasn’t stopped people from coming. The chamber of commerce and individual business owners have done their best to adapt to the deluge. They designated one Inn as the “Cullen House”, organized tours and events, and a business owner has even attached the series name to his charter aircraft flights.
Should the chamber of commerce get to anoint the Cullen house? – photo via areese
The degree to which Forks has already been taken over by Twilight mania is particularly interesting because extrapolating from the trends seen in the Robocop case, a seemingly crazy notion becomes almost plausible – could fans eventually outright own and operate Forks, Washington?
Why would this happen?
Before writing this idea off, let’s look at some of the tendencies that will continue to evolve in the near future:
How would this even work in practice?
Here’s one scenario – Let’s say It’s 2021, and a teenager who grew up building Twilight replica houses in Sims 3 has grown up. They visit Forks and see it’s an even bigger tourist destination that today, the existing Cullen House B&B is good , but they sense something is not quite as authentic as it could be. So they post a project idea – a fan-funded, fan-created Twilight replica house to be run as a B&B, restaurant, and cafe.
The project might cost $400,000, but sliced into small shares, many real fans jump at the opportunity to be part owner of the venture. Many of these fans were teenagers when the series first came out, but they are now in a position to make real contributions. Some contribute with funding, others with legal or operational expertise, others with planning, and others will surely be local and will help with the execution. The project would be fan-reviewed, and as such, strikingly authentic. The project would be self-sustaining from its revenues, and it will be seen by visitors as less commercial than other venues, adding to its attractiveness.
Given the millions of Twilight fans, the first project will be over-subscribed, with many more left wanting to participate. This could lead to a second project in which another location is purchased, perhaps a replica of the old high school, which was too expensive to save more than a decade earlier. The site could become a locale for more fan projects such as scene re-enactments, with some revenue going to the real high school.
If all of this starts to sound like the somewhat shady industry of selling stars and other cosmic objects, the difference is that this is tied to very real outcomes. Participants in the fan-funded Forks-Twilight cooperative might get special visitation rights to the B&B, discounts at the store, or access to special virtual visits. Eventually, other popular Forks locations will find it beneficial to work together with the worldwide fan cooperative, and in time, fans around the world could have a significant say in improving the local visitor experience. The cooperative could issue publications, travel guides, and virtual badges from Forks, all with the added legitimacy of its mix of real-world location and worldwide fan base.
These notions have been explored in interesting ways in the past. Author Cory Doctorow envisions a future in which money has become obsolete, the only currency is reputation, and a a cooperative society runs the Magic Kingdom while decayed Wal-Marts are repurposed into theme park rides. What the Robocop statue case shows us that things may not have to change so drastically for some of those ideas to become reality. In the near future there may be a coexistence of fan cooperatives, intellectual property-owning licensors, authors and other creatives, all working together with people from a local geography to drive similar projects.
There are a lot of locations where interesting things could happen. King’s Cross Station in London has its own rich history, but its role in the Harry Potter series has given it a different kind of spotlight. The fictional platform 9 3/4 at King’s Cross station has close to 2,000 checkins on Foursquare (the real platform 9 has only 300 ).
The laws of physics in the real world pose some limitations – photo via katclay
What if Harry Potter fans entered into an agreement with the British National Rail to improve upon Platform 9 3/4? The notion has precedent dating back more than 60 years. In the 1950s, The Sherlock Holmes Society was able to secure prime real estate in one of the most expensive cities in the world and build what would eventually be the Sherlock Holmes museum, even managing to negotiate with the city of Westminster to allow it to receive mail from the previously nonexistent 221B Baker Street address. Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain in the UK, making copyright issues easier, but today the society is able to work as a low-key caretaker of a beloved fictional figure’s home, which they have painstakingly recreated.
A recreated space maintained by a secretive society. Is this the future? Photo via aljordan.
This future also need-not require the takeover of a full town or even a permanent location. During Comic-Con 2009 and 2010, SyFy briefly transformed the Hard Rock Café restaurant into a themed location based on Café Diem from the TV show Eureka, and Friends‘ Central Perk showed up briefly in London a couple of years ago. Could fans similarly and spontaneously organize temporary theme-ings of venues? At the very least, could fans coordinate actors to ride the subway in costumes, a-la Subway Improv?
Back to the present day and to the Robocop statue itself, the jury is still out on how it will work out. Even though it seems like the funding is there and it might get built, there are hurdles to overcome. This case’s juxtaposition of valued icon and spotlight location puts it at the leading edge of a potential trend and has ignited a conversation about the value of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. If all goes well, initiatives such as these might just allow for ways to channel nostalgia for imagined pasts into projects that help make real futures better.
I'm a technology and new media geek who is fascinated by the social web, systems thinking, analytics, and behavior.
MBA (HBS) and engineer (ITESM).
Diverse tastes in text, images, music.
Hungry to learn more and try new things.
