You want a scary robot? here he is. ED-209 is the machine that failed to become the favoured OCP Enforcement Droid in Robocop. It's a headless chicken mechanism, and it's demonstration to the board was a bloody failure. ED is the scary robot in Robocop. It looks like something that could exists - we really have the technology to build one of these beasts right now.

If two legged perambulation can be built into a £80 toy (Robosapien), then it would be technically possible to build a walking gun platform with some artificial intelligence and guns. I certainly believe that we are in an era where such a unit is possible.

Much like the afore mentioned Robospien, ED 209 can not negotiate stairs, and in what I found to be the scariest moment of Robocop, it falls down a stairwell can’t get up. The resulting stop-frame animated thrashings are Bloody Frightening.

They toy (which was boxed as ED290 - the Robocop cartoon of the time named it such) is unique as its colours match Ventolin Inhalers (used by asthmatics) exactly. And when I say exactly, I mean it. It also has a cap firing mechanism on the back, so you can re-enac t that scene where he “goes bad”.

By Robocop 3, ED 209 goes from really scary monster to thing of ridicule as one is deactivated by a child. A shame as ED-209 was poorly used in both sequels.