Was there a movie called ...
Question: Was there a movie called Robo-Jocks?I think it came out in the late '80s, but no one seems to remember this flick. Do you?
Answer: You're looking for Stuart Gordon's futuristic Robot Jox (1990), which takes place 50 years after the human race was nearly wiped out by nuclear war. Now the world's nations avoid war by settling conflicts one on one: Two warriors climb inside giant robot armor and duke it out in a public arena. When I interviewed Gordon some years ago, he told me that the film's title "started out as RoboJox; in fact, I always like to say that the 't' in Robot Jox is silent. We were threatened by Orion over the title because of Robocop [1987]. They claimed we were interfering with their ability to do business, that they had spent all this money on their title and we were somehow getting a free ride. The thing that I found upsetting about the whole business is that we had started our movie before they started theirs. But it took us so long to finish Robot Jox that they were ready to do the [first] RoboCop sequel by the time we got our movie out."
