Tweet becomes a Robocop social phenomenon

It all started with a tweet from a guy in Philadelphia named @MT. It was directed at Detroit mayor Dave Bing: “@mayordavebing Philadelphia has a statue of Rocky & Robocop would kick Rocky’s butt. He’s a GREAT ambassador for Detroit.”

Bing wrote back: “@MT There are not any plans to erect a statue to Robocop. Thank you for the suggestion.”

The exchange, so absurd but taken just seriously enough, led to a Facebook movement and then on to the crowd source funding site Kickstarter where a Detroit non-profit began raising money to erect a statue of Robocop. It’s one of those things, you know? The joke isn’t funny enough for one person to put up $50,000, but it might be funny enough for 25,000 people to put up two bucks each. So far they’ve raised over $7000 toward that goal.