"Short Circuit" is one of those not-bad little movies that kids in the 80s tended to grow up with on heavy VHS rotation; which helpfully explains why news that it's landed on the reboot list has half the web reporting this as dire news (director is Tim Hill, late of the live-action "Chipmunks" movies) and the other half reporting it in the context of being snarky about people having an opinion about kitschy 80s reboots.
The original film was about a prototype military combat-robot (one of a set) that attained sentience after being struck by lightning and went on the run to avoid being disassembled ("killed") for research. Supposedly it was concieved as a killer-robot-rampage movie, but eventually became a comedy ("Johnny Five" communicates almost-exclusively in childish jokes and pop-culture references.) It's somewhat noteworthy in being a "wacky nonhuman buddy" movie that was otherwise cast exclusively with adults as opposed to precocious kids... and somewhat notorious for Fisher Stevens' (now an Oscar Winner as producer of "The Cove!") eh, "broad" portrayal of an Indian computer wiz.
At one point the "reboot" script was a psuedo-sequel with a little kid meeting the original(?) Johnny Five, not sure if that's still the case. Part of me would like to see this be a "pretend-this-is-something-people-have-been-waiting-for" deal, possibly with NOVA running the drone/armed-robot stuff in Afghanistan. Johnny Five versus his "modern" counterparts? I'd pay to see that, sure.
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