“Short Circuit” Remake In Planning

Well before Wall-E made an appearance, the world had the opportunity to meet “Johnny Number 5,” a cute and funny robot from the 1986 movie Short Circuit.  As is the case with many of the movies we loved in the 80s, this film will be remade. 

I’m not as emotionally invested in this one as I am with others so I’m not overly bothered (or maybe I’m just getting used to all of these classics getting resurrected and given facelifts) but I am encouraged by the fact that Dimension Films has tapped Dan Milano to write script.

Milano currently works on the show Robot Chicken (as a writer and voice for some of the characters) which I find incredibly funny.  I think he could be a good fit as the scriptwriter especially since the original farfetched plot (starring Steve Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy) was “about an armed robot that acquired a personality after a lightning strike, and sought the help of humans to prevent its destruction by its makers in the military.”  See?  It will take a special kind of humor to bring that back to the big screen and I think that Milano could do it justice.

As with the first movie, David Foster, will produce the remake and said “we’re bringing Number 5 into the 21st Century and taking advantage of the improvements in robotics that are so massive that robots are now performing heart surgeries in hospitals.”

Well, I’m not sure if this movie really needed to be remade but I think that Foster has a good point.  Robots and technology has come a long way since 1986 so it could be really interesting to see where they take the plot of this new film.

image: Amazon