Why Was Robocop Used To Advertise British Washing Machines?

There were a lot of impossible blockbusters in the 1980s, where a wild idea met a tiny budget to create a monstrous smash hit, but none were perhaps as surprising as 1987’s Robocop.

Despite starring a cast of relative unknowns, being released by a relatively small producer and facing distribution issues due to its extreme violence, Robocop was a massive smash hit, received relative critical acclaim during an era when genre films were sneered at and became a pop culture juggernaut.

We have a range of Metro City-themed pop culture t-shirts, but one particular tie-in that was especially popular in the United Kingdom was the home computer game that was released a year later.

Published by Ocean Software to coincide with the home video release, Robocop the game was the best-selling home computer release of the entire 1980s, famously staying in the top five of the ZX Spectrum charts for nearly two years.

Perhaps its most famous element was its theme song; unlike the bombast of the Robocop movie theme by Basil Poledouris, Jonathan Dunn’s title screen theme had a remarkable melancholy for a straightforward action game, reflecting the satirical and cerebral themes of the film more than the ultraviolence.

Because of this, it became a surprisingly popular and common song outside of the gaming world, which led to one of the most unusual accidental collaborations of all time.

Ariston, now Hotpoint, was a kitchen appliance company known throughout Europe that had rolled out a bizarre series of adverts featuring their slogan “And On And Ariston”.

According to Mr Dunn, the son of an advertising executive was playing the Game Boy version of Robocop, and the executive immediately sought out the rights to put it in what was a truly surreal, almost hypnotic advert in the early 1990s.

Whilst the films wavered in quality somewhat, the games remained popular in the UK and helped to cement the legend of Robocop as a pop culture phenomenon in the decades since.