FROM DREDD TO DROID: Judge Dredd and RoboCop

Back during the Reagan years there was a glut of violent action movies catering to folks who wanted less complicated heroes.  The Sixties and Seventies had been too confusing and upsetting; people wanted a return to the John Wayne era, when the Good Guys slaughtering the Bad Guys in an orgy of gunfire was considered wholesome family entertainment.

However, the new action heroes were not plain Everymen of the John Wayne or Gary Cooper stripe.  Instead they were insanely buff fitness freaks like Schwarzenegger (Commando, Conan) and Stallone (Cobra, Rambo), whose lavishly-tended physiques made them more like TV wrestlers than traditional movie stars.  As such, they were perfect symbols of the grotesque, steroid-enhanced egotism of the 1980s.

These films established all the tropes of the action genre which still persist today.  Obviously there are people who never get tired of this stuff.  But for others, the simplistic, even fascistic mentality of these movies was perfect fodder for satire.

One of the earliest such satires was the British comic-book Judge Dredd.


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