It’s been another kind’a weird week. The best part has been the odd sense of getting stuff done but also making time for fun things like LEGO building. I began the week spending two days building LEGO 42182 NASA Lunar Rover and then spent last night doing a MOC (“my own creation”) using the LEGO 42140 App-Controlled Transformation Vehicle kit and, with instructions from Rebrickable, built a motorized Johnny 5 robot from the movie, Short Circuit.

After last night’s LEGO build I went looking for trailers from the Short Circuit movie, which then reminded me of how bad the movie was. Ugh. Well, it was a sci-fi 1980s fantasy movie with no demand to be “real,” so okay(?). I forgot that this movie was directed by John Badham, who was having quite the decade with Wargames, Blue Thunder, American Flyers and then this movie. I guess he needed a sci-fi romantic comedy after the first two. A far cry from the “realism” of Wargames, or dystopian grittiness of Blue Thunder, this one was one of the first to give us a “robot friend” with expressive eyes via the creative use of the camera shutter panels and tank treads for locomotion. The use of a lightning strike to gain sentience (and then a defibrillator to revive) is pretty laughable today and the depiction of the East-Indian scientist, “Ben Jabituya,” by Fisher Stevens is a horrible cultural stereotype. But then, the whole movie is 1980s slap-stick with buffoon criminals, uptight military officers, clueless scientists and a comical robot stringing together catch-phrases that it learned from watching TV. WALL*E is a much better film, but that didn’t take away from my interest in building this Johnny 5 LEGO robot. 

I guess the lesson is, even though the “source material” is more than a little suspect, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying the possibilities that the character(s) present. I’ve always had a strong attraction to sci-fi, but my obsession with robots didn’t spring up until I started teaching robotics. I’d been teaching robotics for two years using Wonder Workshop’s Dash and Dot robots and then the more sophisticated robot from Makeblock mBot robots, but it was until I moved to Las Vegas and started teaching robotics using the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 robots and then found plans to build a programmable WALL*E robot that I was hooked. It’s funny that the actual LEGO WALL*E kit was discontinued before I caught the bug, but I’ve been building different versions of that robot over half-a-dozen times over the past seven years. I’m either building WALL*E robots or Mars Rovers… yikes. Have a great weekend, y’all. 

MOC 42140 Johnny 5 by AltBrickitect-2
MOC 42140 Johnny 5 by AltBrickitect-2

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Tags: Johnny 5, LEGO 42140 Vehicle, movie robots, robots in the media, video Fridays

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