In the '80s and early '90s, seemingly every film and comic franchise imaginable got mined for a cartoon and an accompanying toy line. However, a surprising amount of those cartoons were spun off from franchises steeped in graphic violence, gratuitous sex, and other things generally not intended for children, because money frequently makes a more compelling argument than common sense.

6 RoboCop Gets Turned into a Weird Inspector Gadget-Like Cartoon

MGM Animation

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

The Mature Source Material:

Originally given an X rating, RoboCop is the hyperviolent story of a cop who suddenly finds himself getting upgraded to "robo" status after being blasted into brain-soaked skull fragments by a gang of murderous drug dealers.

Orion Pictures

Blood should have humorously spurted upward, but it didn't. So, serious stuff.

Rebuilt as a cyborg powered by baby food and justice, RoboCop brutally steamrolls his way through the criminal underworld while all manner of stomach-roiling gore explodes around him. A rapist gets shot in the penis, a man gets mulched into wet, quivering pieces by the artillery cannons of an evil walking tank, and Miguel Ferrer snorts lines of cocaine off of two sets of prostitute breasts before getting his kneecaps blasted apart and then blown up with a grenade.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

In short, it is one of the finest motion pictures ever made.

The Kid-Friendly Adaptation:

The 1998 cartoon RoboCop: Alpha Commando throws all of that out the window and recasts RoboCop as a dime store Inspector Gadget trying to catch criminals with a healthy dose of hijinks, including one episode where he dresses up as a snowman to save Christmas:

MGM Animation

With a green scarf, obviously, to keep his snow warm.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

And here he is going undercover in a Carmen Sandiego hat, disappearing so completely into his disguise that we almost didn't recognize him.