Wolf Gnards

I just finished reading The Hound of the Baskervilles the other day, and I think I may have solved a bit of a mystery myself. Not regarding the actual book or any other literary type debate, of course, but something in the cinema classic Short Circuit 2. A fine, fun loving robot movie, but I was always a little hesitant actually to even read The Hound of the Baskervilles because Johnny 5 gave away the ending in the movie. Early in the film, he speed reads through a copy and says, “I think the chauffeur did it…” read, read, read, flip, flip, flip, “He did.” Thanks, robot. Now Sherlock Holmes stories aren’t really about solving mysteries, they’re a little more about the adventure of the chase, so I was willing to give it a read even after Johnny’s kind of rude spoiler.

Except (and here’s a real spoiler alert)…

The chauffeur didn’t do it! Baskerville’s neighbor the naturalist did it. So, either Johnny did a terrible job reading this book or he didn’t read it at all. Johnny 5 has been keeping a secret… Johnny 5 can’t read. J5 has done quite a bit of speed-reading throughout the Short Circuit films, but how much useful information has he retained. He mostly just shouts, “More Input!” without actually demonstrating any learned knowledge. Now if you watched the scene, you’ll notice that he does read the note left by Ally Sheedy, but he reads it in her voice, so this could have been merely a recording. Which makes him one of the more expensive tape recorders on the market.

Johnny 5 Can’t Read

This is the after school special version of Short Circuit. Johnny simply spends most of the films trying to cover up the fact that he’s an illiterate buffoon. All that rapid flipping through pages is just a ruse. He claimed to read the entire encyclopedia in the first film, but anyone can flip through pages. I can flip through pages all day, it don’t make me no genius. Notice he gets most of his lines from TV shows and movies, in fact, he gets all of his lines from television and movies. I can’t remember Johnny 5 making a single literary reference. He’s proven he can watch TV and parakeet lines, but can he read? Now remember number 5 was a military designed robot, so reading probably wasn’t a high priority on some general’s check list. As long as it could shoot straight is all that mattered. The other S.A.I.N.T robots utilize very basic commands, which could mean that reading isn’t something they would be programmed with.

However, one flaw with this is that if he can’t read or write, how did he pass his citizenship test at the end of Short Circuit 2? It could have been a verbal test, of course.

Johnny 5 Can Read, But Not Well

Johnny can read, but he retains almost zero information. Think about it, this is a robot with a finite amount of hard drive space. He had a big ol’ 500 MB upgrade in Short Circuit 2, and while that’s just some expansion memory, it gives us a guide to his memory confinements. You could probably hold 500 eBooks with that, which is a lot of books, but not at the rate Johnny reads them. Anything new he reads means he has to delete something old that he read. So, what happens when Johnny reads The Hound of the Baskervilles is by the time he’s in the middle, he has to delete what he read in the beginning and by the time he’s at the end he has deleted what was in the middle. So, he honestly thought the chauffeur did it in the middle and forgets that he thought that the chauffeur did it by the time he got to the end.

This also explains why Johnny speaks almost exclusively in TV catch phrases… it’s all he can remember. Johnny’s mind is basically a database filled with corrupted pop culture fragments, sort of like the Swiss cheese memory from Quantum Leap (except without the perverted hologram… or the time traveling. Actually, it’s nothing like Quantum Leap). Also, this is the reason why he purchased Pinocchio and Frankenstein later on for further study. Being a computer he should be able to pull up the complete work at any time, unless he doesn’t remember it. One problem though is if we go back to The Hound of the Baskervilles, and that is there is no chauffeur. There’s no character of a chauffeur in the whole book. That’s more than forgetting, that’s demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of the material.

The movies have shown that number 5 can, at least, understand what a symbol means. He knows that a butterfly is a butterfly and a butterfly is beautiful, but can he truly decipher what a series of symbols represents? Can he read a sentence about a butterfly and understand it?

Follow up:

Other Reading Robots

We know the Terminator robots can read because we can see their heads-up displays. However, why does a machine need a HUD? This means that Terminator vision works through a video lens in the eye that transfers the data to a small screen inside the Terminator’s head that is seen by yet a smaller video recorder which is then presumably fed into a CPU.

Star Trek’s Data is by far one of the most competent machines with reading, writing, and operating other computers, whereas the Sentinels of The Matrix, who demonstrated no higher learning abilities, represent the lowest literary scale. The Sentinels as you remember were built for one thing: search & destroy (which, of course, are two things, but still neither of those two things are reading the classics). When you build your war machine remember reading only gets in the way of the laser fire.