The first sign of aging isn’t grey hair or wrinkles around the corners of your mouth. No, the best way to know when you’re getting old is by monitoring when the movies of your childhood start getting remade. Right now Hollywood is knee-deep in remaking the 80s, and that means I’m very freakin old indeed.
The latest retread from the decade that brought you legwarmers and President Reagan may be Short Circuit, according to Clint over at Moviehole. He says he’s been hearing rumors for awhile now, but this time he’s actually gotten someone reliable to acknowledge them. When? Who? How? We don’t know yet, but I’m sure that even now, somewhere deep beneath a studio soundstage, Steve Guttenberg is being unfrozen.
So you’re a bubbly blonde 20-year-old with a proclivity for wearing exotic underwear and thus much too young to have any idea what old Mr. Tyler is talking about? Let Grampa Josh clue you in. Short Circuit was a little kid’s wet dream. Yes, little kids have wet dreams. It starts about 10. Ok this is getting creepy.
Anyway, Short Circuit was the ultimate kid’s fantasy… Steve Guttenberg gets his very own robot. Who wouldn’t want to be Steve Guttenberg under those circumstances? A military experiment into robo-soldiers goes awry, one of the robo-soldiers becomes intelligent, escapes the army and sets out into the world to make a non-violent life for himself. At the age of nine, it was literally the greatest movie I’d ever seen. I haven’t watched it as an adult, so I have no idea how it holds up, but I’m willing to bet that Spider-Man 2 at least, is better.
Still, we always hate to have our childhood memories erased and replaced by some inferior new version concocted to appeal to modern kids instead of the not-so-modern kid hiding inside each one of us, right? The thought of Short Circuit being remade makes me cringe. It would probably be easy to update, but there’s no way to do it without ruining it. They’ll probably find some way to get Johnny 5 skateboarding and render him in plasticky looking CGI. I’ll keep my memories, thanks.
