History Film / ShortCircuit

* ActualPacifist: What Johnny wants to be, though NOVA trying to capture him in the first film and the bank robbers in the second push him into TechnicalPacifist when he's forced to defend himself. Tellingly, he only applies the absolute minimum amount of carefully-calculated force to preserve is life, it's only after a positvely ''brutal'' attempt on his life that he actively seeks to use violence to stop the robbers, and even then still does so without causing unecessary harm.

** He also mistakes Number 5 for a coffee machine.

* BewareTheNiceOnes: Johnny and Ben. You do ''not'' want to be around Ben if something's happened to Johnny on your watch. Just see BerserkButton above to see why it's an equally bad idea to take Johnny lightly.

* InstantAIJustAddWater: Lightning in this case, but the effect is much the same.

--> '''Number 5''': Colt .45, semi-automatic, play-doh

* VerbalTic: Johnny Five likes to list synonyms of words.

* AbsenteeActor: Newton and Stephanie, despite being the main human characters of the first film, do not appear with Johnny 5 in the sequel (though Ally Sheedy gets a voice cameo reading a letter as the latter).

* GettingCrapPastTheRadar: Quite a bit for what is a fairly family-friendly series.
** In the first film, upon entering Stephanie's home while she's taking a bath, Number 5 has this to say...
--> '''Number 5:''' ''Niiiiice'' [[UnusualEuphemism software]].
** In one scene in the second film (when Fred is getting his loan from the Loan Shark in a bar), it is very obvious that it is a ''stripper'' bar, and the woman dancing in the background, while somewhat out of focus, ''bares her breasts and jiggles them to her audience.''

''Short Circuit'' is a pair of films about a bleeding edge military robot who becomes self-aware. Dubbed "Number Five", his first instinct as a sentient being is to {{invert|edTrope}} the KillerRobot genre: he doesn't want to kill, and is hunted by the weapons manufacturer that made him. It doesn't slot easily into any one genre, instead toying with [[MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness hard sci-fi]], romantic comedy, tragedy, revenge drama, and {{slapstick}} (Number Five ignoring his laser cannon to sling mud at people).

--->'''Johnny Five''': ''(catches crowbar midswing)'' '''Bad humans!'''''

* PrivateMilitaryContractors: Skroeder and his men are private security but their numbers and equipment make them more like a small army.

* FunWithAcronyms: S.A.I.N.T. Touches on nightmare fuel, given the root is '''S'''trategic '''A'''rtificially '''I'''ntelligent '''N'''uclear '''T'''ransport.. The SAINT series are nuke delivery platforms, designed ([[ChekhovsSkill as explained at the start of the first film]]) to be para-dropped into enemy cities, use their maneuverability, intelligence, and weaponry to safely deliver their nuclear payload to their target, and then blow themselves up. [[note]] In other words: suicide bombers. [[/note]]

* GeneralRipper: Skroeder decides (without bothering to listen to the guy who built it or coordinate with law enforcement) that recovering Number Five requires loads and loads of military firepower aimed in the general direction of the robot regardless of the presence of innocent bystanders.

-->'''Skroeder''' [after he thinks he's just destroyed Number 5]: Now that, my friend, is how you kick ass!

** In one scene in the second film (when Fred is getting his loan from the Loan Shark in a bar), it is very obvious that it is a ''stripper'' bar, and the woman dancing in the background, while somewhat out of focus, ''bares her breasts and jiggles them to her audience.''* GoodCostumeSwitch: In the first movie, Number Five loses the plate covering his [[TalkingLightbulb "mouth"]] during his escape, making him look much less intimidating than the other SAINT prototypes.

* DoAnythingRobot: Let's see... Johnny has a parachute, "multi-frequency remote control" that allows him to control anything electric (within range), and a SwissArmyWeapon that extends to [[spoiler: cut through solid steel bank vault walls]], unlock cars and unscrew their radios, and help build little toy robots.

%% * GettingCrapPastThe Radar: Due to overwhelming and persistent misuse, GCPTR is on-page examples only until 01 June 2021. If you are reading this in the future, please check the trope page to make sure your example fits the current definition.
* GoodCostumeSwitch: In the first movie, Number Five loses the plate covering his [[TalkingLightbulb "mouth"]] during his escape, making him look much less intimidating than the other SAINT prototypes.

** After Nova goes bankrupt during the TimeSkip, the fate of all of the other robots (including the three that Johnny Five reprograms) is unclear.

* FreudianSlip: In the first film, when Stephanie Speck calls Nova Laboratories on the phone, saying that she would want to speak to "one of your head warmongers", the person receiving the phone call calls Dr. Marner "Dr. Warmonger" before correcting himself and handing Dr. Marner the phone.

** Johnny himself essentially gets one through the entire second movie, as it's brutally pointed out to him at every turn that, aside from Newton, Stephanie, and Ben, ''not a single human being'' believes he's truly alive. A Catholic priest shoos him out of a church believing him to be nothing more than a telepresence device, the police impound him as stolen property instead of arresting him, and Los Locos, Fred, and [[spoiler:Oliver]] all take advantage of his naive and trusting nature to get what they want out of him.

* StereotypicalSouthAsianEnglish: Part of Ben Jabituya's joke is that he speaks with such an exaggerated accent despite being born and raised in the US to American-born parents. Stevens researched the role quite extensively, hiring a dialect coach and even traveling to India to get the accent right, but today considers the role something of an Old Shame.

* TechnicalPacifist: Johnny Five was created as a military robot, but decides that killing is wrong. He's not above throwing thugs around, so long as they don't die.

* WhatMeasureIsANonHuman: It takes a lot of convincing before the human leads will concede that Number Five is alive and not JustAMachine. This is the main moral premise of both films, leading to the end of the second movie in which Johnny is publicly declared a sentient being and made a citizen of the United States.