Short Circuit 2

Finally turned up Short Circuit 2 on DVD, and surprisingly, it stands up better than the first in the series. Fisher Stevens gets to play the main role, which is a good thing, and with the support of Michael McKean (an actor who doesn't apparently age - he looks as young/old here as he does in those later mockumentaries he's well known for).
But the star of the show is still Johnny 5. Here he steals every scene he's in with ease, and gets away with incredible feats and stunts. So what, he's a star. Once again he's voiced by Tim Blaney, who seems to have spent most of his screen career being heard and not seen. Blaney has the character down pat, in every detail. Without this particular voice, there's no doubt Johnny would be an altogether different robot.
The plot is no big deal; the movie's about Johnny 5 rather than anything more complicated. And it's a lot of fun. Catching up with both Johnny and and Fisher Stevens's malapropisms again makes it well worth watching more than once.

Short Circuit

I haven’t seen Short Circuit since my children were young – it was one of those movies (along with its sequel) that we watched over and over. The story and characters are pretty simple, but what makes the film is the wonderful character of Johnny 5 with his increasingly warm ‘humanity,’ his delightful eyebrows, and his constant cry of Need More Input!
I thought Steve Guttenberg was good at the time, but he seems a bit flat in the movie now, a bit slow-paced. And I thought Ally Sheedy must have vanished from the movie scene, but in fact she's kept on making movie after movie ever since (and made a number before this as well). She plays an over-the-top-irritating, too silly for her own good, and pretty much one-note character whom we don’t ever really believe in. Fisher Stevens’ pseudo Indian character (the father of all the other Asian IT people in movies?) has some funny malapropic lines and some surprisingly crude ones, considering this is supposed to be a kids’ movie. He was the only actor to make it into the sequel, where I think his lines might have been toned down a little, but it’s a long time since I saw the sequel (which also featured Michael McKean, that mad actor who’s appeared in some of the spoof documentaries made by Christopher Guest).
All the actors seem to be on that second-level area where they get plenty of work but they’re not really household names. I thought Steve Guttenberg had vanished from movies, as well, but in fact, he’s been just as busy as Sheedy. Obviously there are thousands of movies out there that we just never hear of – until you check out IMDB!
Any carping about the movie aside, it’s Johnny 5 who’s the real star. Apparently there were more than a dozen actual Johnny 5s, swapped and shuffled as required. Certainly some of them must have barely survived the ‘stunts’ they went through.