10 Great Sci-Fi Movies Ruined By One Character
3. Short Circuit - Ben Jabituya
Short Circuit is a very sweet, very charming robot comedy about a military droid who escapes his facility and learns more about the human race.
It's a delightful watch with voice actor Tim Blaney doing a great job of bringing Johnny 5 to life. The movie came out in 1986 though, not 1946, which you might expect considering there's a big ol' bit of brownface in it.
Ben Jabituya, one of the engineers who built Johnny 5, is seemingly of Indian descent. The actor who plays him, Fisher Stevens, is very much not.
Alongside the use of makeup to darken his skin, Stevens also employs a very spotty "Indian" accent to give Jabituya a bumbling foreigner persona. Safe to say that this is not acceptable and makes Short Circuit very hard to watch these days.
Stevens seems like a really solid guy and has said many times that he regrets playing the character the way he did. Ben Jabituya is a causality of an abhorrent practice of stereotyping non-White people on film that, thankfully, has died down today.
It's just sad that this character comes at the expense of what is a lovely movie.