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Short Circuit actor Fisher Stevens regrets playing an Indian character
May 13, 2021 by:
SHORT CIRCUIT is probably one of the most memorable films of the 80s, thanks mostly to the likable talking robot, Johnny 5. Released on
May 9, 1986, Johnny 5 still feels like a next-level movie star, brought to life via a combination of then-cutting-edge special effects, as well as old-fashioned puppeteering and a solid vocal performance from Tim Blaney. While Johnny 5 has continued to age well for most fans of the film, one element of the movie that seems frozen in time is Fisher s Stevens performance as Indian engineer Ben Jabituya. Fisher Stevens, a white man, plays up the heavily stereotyped role for laughs and would continue to do in the 1988 sequel but now Stevens says he would never do that part again today.
Joey Cramer, aged 12, in Flight of the Navigator
Credit: Alamy
In May 2016, headlines surfaced online that rightly shocked film fans of a certain age – former child actor Joey Cramer, star of Flight of the Navigator, had been charged with bank robbery in Canada. Seeing the headlines – accompanied by a gaunt mug shot – it was easy to write off Cramer, then 42 years old, as just another child star gone off the rails and onto the scrapheap.
I was guilty of having that exact thought, and hovered over the story for a second longer than usual. For me, like millions of Eighties kids, Flight of the Navigator still packs an imagination-zinging punch. Released in 1986 – in the wake of ET, Back to the Future, and The Goonies – the Disney-produced film has that uniquely Eighties, Spielberg-esque spirit: a kids’ fantasy adventure through time and space, with an all-American family at its heart.
Some sequels continue a story. Others repeat it. Men in Black II creates a new threat for the MIB, but recycles the same premise, which is that mankind can defeat an alien invasion by assigning agents in Ray-Bans to shoot them into goo. This is a movie that fans of the original might enjoy in a diluted sort of way, but there is no need for it except, of course, to take another haul at the box office, where the 1997 movie grossed nearly $600 million.
The astonishing success of the original MiB was partly because it was fun, partly because it was unexpected. We d never seen anything like it, while with MiBII, we ve seen something exactly like it. In the original, Tommy Lee Jones played a no-nonsense veteran agent, Will Smith was his trainee, Rip Torn was their gruff boss, and makeup artist Rick Baker and a team of f/x wizards created a series of fanciful, grotesque aliens. Although the aliens had the technology for interplanetary travel, they were no match for the big guns of