Short circuit
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- ''For the article on faulty electrical circuits, see Short circuit.
The story revolves around an intelligent and sentient robot named "Number 5" that is worth $11,000,000 (and 17 cents). The robot later takes the name "Johnny 5". A sequel, Short Circuit 2, was released in 1988.
Plot
Taglines:- Something wonderful has happened... Number Five is alive!
- Life is not a malfunction.
Number 5 is one of five prototype robots proposed for use by the US military, although the scientist mainly responsible for creating them, Dr. Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg), is more interested in peaceful uses of their artificial intelligence, like playing musical instruments. A demonstration is under way in the grounds of the company that makes them and other robots, Nova Laboratories, in Damon, Washington. After a lightning storm shuts down the presentation of the prototypes, a power surge hits Number 5 while it is recharging and alters its program, causing a malfunction. An associated accident causes it to be taken outside company grounds and it wanders off, unable to communicate and not knowing where it is.
Number 5 ends up at the home of animal lover Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy) who initially thinks it's an extra-terrestrial visitor, but then determines the robot to be built by Nova. She decides that the robot is sentient and subsequently tries to help it escape from its creators, who only see it as a very dangerous, expensive and wayward machine. At the same time, Number 5 develops an understanding about the value of life and, realizing that he himself is sentient, develops a fear of his militaristic programming and the disassembly that awaits him back at Nova, believing it to be the same as death for him.
After various adventures, and several escapes from a small army of armed guards and regular soldiers led by the gung-ho paranoid ex-military security chief Captain Skroeder (G.W. Bailey), Number 5 manages to fool its creators that it has been destroyed. In fact, Number 5 builds a duplicate of itself from spare parts, and takes off to Montana with Stephanie and Newton, who's lost his job for siding with the robot.
Inspiration
It was thought that this movie was inspired by E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, though some believe it was also used as a defiant change from most other 'living robot' movies of the time, ironic in the fact that, originally, it's rumored that the movie had a story similar to that of The Terminator. According to the commentary, however, the genesis for the film came when the director attempted to watch mainstream 'robot movies' for inspiration for their own feature robot movie after the success of a short made-for-school film starring a robot. After drawing a connection between all the feature-length robot movies they had seen (including Star Wars) with the characters already acknowledging and interacting with the robots as if they were alive, the idea for the movie's plot came, which asked the question: "What if the robot WAS alive? What would people REALLY think?"Video game
A video game for ZX Spectrum[link], Commodore 64[link] and Amstrad CPC[link] was also made based on the movie. It featured two parts, one arcade adventure where Number 5 had to escape from the lab and one action part where Number 5 runs across the countryside avoiding soldiers and bunnies.Sequel
The movie has gained a cult following, and spawned a sequel, which was largely criticized by fans as being the weaker of the two. There have been rumors of a possible third movie to have been in the works but subsequently scrapped after the poor performance of the first sequel.
End credits
One feature in the first movie is the ending credit sequence which features snippets of scenes cut from the final product, a gimmick that predated the explosion of director's cuts and deleted scenes DVD options of recent years.Trivia
- The story is reminiscent of Robot AL-76 Goes Astray, a 1941 short story by Isaac Asimov, in which a tightly programmed robot is lost and finds itself in an unfamiliar environment which it can't understand.
- According to the commentary in the DVD, Johnny 5 was the most expensive part of the movie, requiring several parts to be made for sequences (almost everything else in the movie, however, was relatively low-cost, allowing them to pump as much money as they needed into the robot's making in other production problems). He was also voiced in real-time by his puppeteers, the director believing it to give a more realistic interaction between the robot and the other actors than putting in his voice in post-production (though a few of his lines were redubbed, later).
- During Stephanie's impromptu news interview, you can see a cameo appearance by the director as the news cameraman.
External links
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