# RoboCop vs. The Terminator?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/robocop-vs-the-terminator/194053>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Created:** [August 9, 2003, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/robocop-vs-the-terminator/194053 "2003-08-09T17:21:25Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![rjung](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/45deac/32.png) [@rjung](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rjung)\
**Post date:** [August 10, 2003, 7:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/robocop-vs-the-terminator/194053/21 "2003-08-10T07:08:58Z")

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> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Skeezix \*  
> Not as much fun as the Alien vs Predator books were, but then _they_ didn’t need half as much exposition to get to the cool parts. 🙂

But it had **Walt Simonson** art! Woo hoo! 😃

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**Author:** ![blowero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/41988e/32.png) [@blowero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/blowero)\
**Post date:** [August 10, 2003, 8:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/robocop-vs-the-terminator/194053/22 "2003-08-10T08:03:44Z")

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Terminator would win hands down. Terminator is a machine. Once you get through the armor, Robocop is dependent on the fragile human brain underneath.

What’s cool, though - Terminator is human on the _outside_, and Robocop is human on the _inside_.

Terminator - crunchy center  
Robocop - creamy filling

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**Author:** ![Green\_Bean](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/green_bean/32/1760_2.png) [@Green\_Bean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Green_Bean)\
**Post date:** [August 10, 2003, 1:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/robocop-vs-the-terminator/194053/23 "2003-08-10T13:30:41Z")

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Robocop is perhaps my favorite movie of all time. And I’m a pretty big fan of the first Terminator movie too. While I’ve seen T2, I haven’t seen T3, read any comics, or know about any “canon” outside the actual movies. So I’m basing my opinion on the 2 movies only:

The Terminator would almost surely win. He is purely a killing machine. As we saw in T1, he just keeps going and going and going until he reaches his goal.

Robocop, on the other hand, is _not_ a killing machine. He is a police officer cyborg. Like human police officers, his main goal is not killing. It’s enforcement of the law. If he needs to kill to enforce the law, so be it. But, unlike the Terminator, he is capable of making that decision. We see that he tries to arrest Dick Jones at first, not kill him. Once he determines that killing Boddicker, Jones, and the rest of them is really his best option, then he does it. But it’s not his first choice.

Furthermore, as others in this thread have pointed out, he is much more easily killed/disabled due to the fact that he has largely human parts.

So, my money would be on the Terminator. But it’s not a sure thing. After all, Sarah Connor did him in in T1. With a combination of cleverness and luck, Robocop could possibly win.

**Muad’Dib** : A thread like this is sure to contain spoilers. How could we possibly argue either side without evidence from the movies? Your criticism is off-base.

I think **asterion** went above and beyond by not including spoilers from T3. I thank him for it, because I haven’t seen it yet, but I opened this thread knowing that I might find T3 spoilers. T3 might well contain relevant information that would bear on someones opinion of the matter.

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