Ah, he knew how to party did Bob Morton. The slimy, double-dealing treacherous OCP executive in the 1987 classic RoboCop. He was born too early and in the wrong genre universe, else he may have benefited by Darth Vader’s warning “Be careful not to choke on your aspirations” because Bob surely did. In his climb up the corporate tree of OCP management by orchestrating the creation of the titular law enforcer, he screwed over corporate foe Dick Jones and got himself blown to pieces by a nasty guy with the unfortunate name of Clarence.I don’t know why Clarence seems such an unfortunate name, I’m sure there are lots of very nice people with that name, but this Clarence was a nasty piece of work who always seemed pissed off at people, and I always figured his name had something to do with it. Anyway, Clarence was a buddy of Dick so Bob got put on his shitlist and, well, Clarence had a way of dealing with his anger issues with guns and grenades. So, that was it for poor Bob.
Okay, maybe Bob snorted too much cocaine and would shit on his own mother for a dollar and a key to the executive washroom, but really, he was my favourite executive bad guy. The guy had no style, no class, and was played to perfection by the great Miguel Ferrer, who sadly died on Thursday aged just 61. I was always thrilled to see Miguel’s name on the credits of anything he was in, and I was truly crushed by the news of his passing. Maybe he never had a great super-star status or appeared in many classic films or shows but he was always a great joy to watch, a great character actor who was for some reason particularly adept at playing slimy bad guys. And his Bob Morton will forever be up there high in my list of slimy bad guys.
RIP Bob Morton, and RIP Miguel.
the ghost of 82 