DETROIT - Detroit will soon have its long-awaited RoboCop statue on display in the city. After nearly 10 years in the making, the giant bronze statue depicting the cyborg law enforcer from the 1987 movie, who patrolled the streets of Detroit in the near future, is nearly complete.

Organizers, who started the Kickstarter campaign in 2011, tell MLive the statue should be done by the end of March. Once it’s complete, the statue will be put on display outside the Michigan Science Center on John R St. most likely sometime this spring.

“We wanted the statue to be outside on the grounds of the Science Center where people didn’t have to pay money to go into the museum to see it,” said Brandon Walley, one of the people behind the project. “We wanted people to be able to see it anytime just by walking.”

Walley says the Science Center hasn’t picked a spot yet where it will be displayed, but a huge ceremony is expected to take place. He says there’s a good chance actor Peter Weller, who played RoboCop, will be there.

“Weller and the original director have expressed interest over the years in coming to the unveiling, but there’s no guarantee. We have built up a relationship with Weller. We met him at a local comic con a few years ago and got to know him. He’s fascinated with Detroit and the city’s architecture.”

Once the head is on, the statue will be 11 feet tall. It has a stainless steel base and weighs a whopping half a ton. Venus Bronze Works of Detroit is a big part of the project. Walley says it was important that as much of the statue was built in Detroit as possible. He says a lot of the Kickstarter money went into giving the restoration company the tools they needed.

“This could have been finished sooner with other institutions, but we wanted this done in Detroit. Finding Venus Bronze Works, one of the top bronze statue restoration companies in the world was big. They do the Joe Louis fist, the Spirit of Detroit statue. We outfitted them with the capabilities of being a foundry. They weren’t really built out for a project of this size. But having a Detroit artist making it in Detroit was really important to us.”

How the project happened: About 10 years ago, someone on Twitter pointed out that Philadelphia had a statue of Rocky and that one of RoboCop would be a “great ambassador for Detroit.” The Twitter user tagged then-Mayor Dave Bing who tweeted back saying there were no plans for a RoboCop statue.

That’s when Walley, a filmmaker, and Jerry Paffendorf, co-founder and CEO of Loveland Technologies went with the idea and created a Kickstarter campaign which raised more than $67,000 with nearly 3,000 worldwide backers.

“It starts with a couple of us having a crazy idea. Then people from all over the world pitched in. We had to figure out on the fly how to make this happen as successfully as possible,” Walley told MLive.

Why so long? “We had to contact MGM who owns the likeness of RoboCop, making sure we did everything right through them. It became a really long process. We had to get the exact model made. That model had to be blown up to over a 10 foot mold. That happened in Vancouver, and Idaho. That took years as well. The owner of Venus Bronze Works went through a cancer scare. That was two more years.”

“Our main goal was to get him done right with the exact likeness. We wanted to make sure it was bronze and beautiful. We would have loved for it to have been off of our plate a half decade ago, but we rolled through it and are seeing it through the finish line.”

Walley says the next time you see the statue, it will be sporting a fully finished dark gray patina.

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