Get ready to have “Who’s Johnny” stuck in your head forever: Short Circuit is getting a do-over. Deadline reports that Spyglass Media Group are bringing the 1986 film back for a remake.
Spyglass hasn’t been very active in almost a decade, but the company also produced the comic book adaptation Wanted and the 2011 remake of Footloose. With Project X Entertainment, who will help to produce Short Circuit, they’re also behind the relaunch of the Scream franchise. (Are you sensing a trend?) For Short Circuit, they’ve brought on writers Eduardo Cisneros and Jason Shuman, who Deadline says will “put a Latinx twist on the screenplay.” The writing duo also wrote the screenplay for this year’s comedy Half Brothers.
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The original Short Circuit starred the extremely-of-an-era trio of Ally Sheedy, Steve Guttenberg, and Fisher Stevens. Stevens’ role is just one of the things the new version will need to change: He was in brownface as an Indian man. The real star, though, is Number 5 (pictured above), a weirdly adorable robot that becomes sentient after being struck by lightning. (His death—temporary though it is—rates a distressing mention on our list of The 12 Most Gratuitous Robot Deaths in Sci-Fi.)
Original director John Badham also directed WarGames, which is surely the next ’80s classic to wind up slated for reboot. But we’ll have to wait and see if Short Circuit makes it to screens, or if it joins the plethora of ’80s remakes lingering in development hell: What happened to Channing Tatum’s version of Splash? The Ryan Reynolds Clue re-do? Chad Stahelski’s Highlander?
This is a remake that I think I can get behind. I really enjoyed the original, but there’s a lot in it (like everything involving Fisher Stevens’s character) that just doesn’t really hold up. Just, please please please, do not make Number 5 some sort of CG monstrosity. The fact that he was a physical, on-set robot really made the movie better.
There was a Footloose remake?
How would you remake WarGames? The hacker milieu is completely different today. Heck, we’re as far from the original movie as it is from the original Eniac.
I recall liking the movie and its sequel, and I keep meaning to revisit them, but my recollection of Fisher Stevens’s broad brownface Hindu caricature makes me hesitant. Even back in the day, when we were less sensitive to the problems of such portrayals, I found it overly cartoonish and a hurdle to get past, though the character per se was fairly likeable aside from the goofy accent. (It was the first time I ever heard that kind of Indian accent caricature — I wasn’t even sure initially what ethnicity he was supposed to be.) It didn’t help that Stevens was elevated to the lead human character in the sequel, due to their inability to get Guttenberg and Sheedy back. (Although they did get Cynthia Gibb, whom I found even hotter than Sheedy.)
Still, I always did like Johnny 5. I have a tendency to be drawn to AI characters in fiction, and Johnny was a likeable character whose design was excellent and very plausible.
@2
How would the basic story need to change though? Kid hacks military computer thinking it’s a video game company, triggers AI into thinking it’s WW3.
But I’m pretty sure War Games was kinda sorta remade as a direct to video release about 10 or 15 years ago. Or maybe it was a sequel. I can’t remember.
@4/Hal: For one thing, it’s a lot less plausible that the modern military’s computer network would be penetrable by a high school kid’s hacking skills. That was remotely credible back in the ’80s when the concept of computer hackers was still relatively new, something the military might not have had enough experience with to safeguard against. But these days, cyberattacks are probably a bigger part of modern warfare than bombs and missiles are, and fighting off hacker intrusion is probably something the Pentagon does on a daily basis. The idea that a schoolkid could be enough of a hacking prodigy to breeze through all their firewalls and air gaps and whatever the hell else they have is far more ludicrous now than it would’ve been then.
@5
Oh, it was always ludicrous, but I don’t think that should stop anyone from getting to the real meat of the story. But there are plenty of ways to reframe it to make it more plausible today. Like a government office or program created to prevent a catastrophe is demolished by the next administration out of spite, creating a hole in security… ahem…
@6: The meat of the original story was about fears of global nuclear war, though. These days, that feels like less of a concern. Maybe you could build something around cyberwarfare and propaganda, but that’s a radically different story.
Also, the idea of “Wow, a teenage kid who’s an expert computer hacker!” doesn’t feel as exceptional now. It’s become a cliche. Any story can be the starting point for creating something new, but it might be so far removed from the source that little of the “meat” would have a recognizable flavor.
@7
True, nuclear annihilation ain’t what it used to be. However, considering the binary opposition playing out in politics and culture right now, how our discourse is often reduced to a simplistic tic-tac-toe of owning the other side, I would think something could be made from that. And I would hope a remake wouldn’t closely follow the original; it need only follow the broad theme of man (or teenager) affecting the child AI via entertainment/militarism.
There was an episode from The X-Files revival a few years ago that touched on this. The name of the episode escapes me but a good watch if you can find it. The one with the drones.
And the real meat of War Games wasn’t nuclear war, it was a machine learning and pointing out the absurdity of man’s self-destructive impulses.
The song is “Who’s Johnny,” not “Where’s Johnny.”
Is this a sequel to the 80’s sci-fi wargame movie?
@11: If you mean Short Circuit, no; it was from the same director as WarGames but was an unrelated story.
Didn’t Chappie already do this?
I’d hope more for a reboot of the sequel – Los locos kick your ass. Los locos kick your face. Los locos kick your balls INTO OUTER SPACE! :D
@10 – A belated thanks for catching that typo!