Sylvester Stallone's Judge Dredd Features An Easter Egg Only Diehard Fans Caught

The 1995 Sylvester Stallone sci-fi action movie "Judge Dredd" is kind of a hot mess. Based on the "Judge Dredd" stories in the British comic anthology series "2000 A.D.," the movie follows Stallone as the eponymous Judge Dredd, one of a number of "judges" who serve as judge, jury, and executioner in an attempt to stop rampant crime in an overpopulated city. With his iconic red and black helmet and massive golden epaulets on his shoulders, Stallone's Dredd is a pretty direct rendition of his comic book counterpart (for the scenes where he doesn't remove the helmet, anyway). While fans of the comics didn't get exactly what they wanted out of a "Judge Dredd" film until Pete Travis's "Dredd" came along in 2012, starring Karl Urban as the grimacing super-cop, there were at least a few nods to the source material in the Stallone version, including one seriously deep cut reference. 

Towards the end of "Judge Dredd," which might just be the stupidest science fiction film to predict the dystopian mess we're all in, Judge Dredd is framed for killing a number of people that were actually taken out by a killer robot called the ABC Warrior, programmed by Dredd's greatest enemy, his clone brother Rico (Armand Assante). For fans of "2000 A.D.," the ABC Warrior was an Easter egg of gargantuan proportions, as it was designed to look like the character Hammerstein, who appeared in "2000 A.D." right alongside Dredd.  

In "Judge Dredd," the ABC Warrior comes from a line of military robots that were allegedly destroyed during "the last war," but Rico managed to find and control one in working order, even trying to kill Judge Hershey (Diane Lane) with the metal monster. He's based on Hammerstein, a character created by Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill in 1978. Hammerstein appeared in the comics "ABC Warriors," "Ro-Busters," and "Nemesis the Warlock," and in 1995, Mills wrote a Judge Dredd story called "Hammerstein" which put the robot into Dredd's world. He fought in the Atomic Wars and even faced off against Judge Dredd and the other Mega City judges, but Mills ended up retconning the whole thing in the next comic he wrote, which moved the timelines around so that Hammerstein and Dredd never would have crossed paths. 

While we didn't get to see much more from the world of "2000 A.D." in the rest of either the "Judge Dredd" movie or "Dredd," Urban has said that he would love to see the Judge Death storyline on the big screen, which would be a whole lot of fun as a "Dredd" sequel. The Judge Death storyline is totally apocalyptic (as opposed to just generally dystopian) and, honestly, the timing's never been better.