Friends... Forever with a murderous robot

Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Popcorn Isn't Real with me, your host, Torvald, and me, your other host, Leif Ehrich. So today we're going to be talking about Space Camp. Yeah, so Space Camp, 1986. It was directed by Harry Weiner. The screenplay for Space Camp was by Clifford Green. He's only written five things, including Baby Secret of the Lost Legends, the year before. Yeah, dude. Only the greatest dinosaur movie ever. I would say that we should find a theory for that movie. I know, but... We'd have to watch it. Well, and I don't know about you, but I certainly don't remember that movie. I only remember the movie we taped over it with. Yeah. Just so everybody knows, Baby Seeker of the Lost Legend. Very probably little known movie. I doubt anyone's heard of it. Our dad, he took Baby Seeker of the Lost Legends and taped over it with a different movie. He liked it so little that that movie was only worth the space that he could use on it.

A little background. Our dad, he liked to make family-friendly edits of movies for us. And he did this using old-school method of two VCRs, where you can linear edit in real time using two VCRs, taping from one to the other and cutting stuff out. So he would just pause the recording on the one that's recording for any bad part and then restart the recording again when the bad part's over. And to his credit, he picked out movies that I think were very good for kids, but ultimately did have a lot of things that weren't kid friendly. Like Terminator. Most movies. Well, Terminator, sure. But like, it was good that he picked some of those. Terminator 2 definitely, though. Terminator 2 is a fantastic kids movie if you take out the gore and stuff. Yeah, no, it's great. But like the Zucker films, right? zucker and abrams yeah comedies yes yes he made a lot of like yeah airplane and top secret and stuff like that which are really like the the humor in that movie in those movies is for the

most part it's very juvenile humor except for random like jokes that aren't that are totally adult so still juvenile adult humor though right yeah that's true um and those movies are great i love those movies but what actually happened was that our dad was thinking of editing top secret for us he was like are there any movies you guys don't like and i told him i was like well there's this movie baby secret of the lost legend where like it's supposed to be a kid's movie but the guy swears in it and as a kid i i was really offended by that i didn't like that at all there there's a a husband and wife team who aren't really getting along very well and they're talking to some like native tribe in africa i remember this movie a lot better than i do i remember nothing about it they're sitting around and the tribe is giving them some soup to eat and he's like are there dead ants in this and they taste it and he goes oh live ants anyway

that's a good line why would anyone ask are there dead ants in this i think dead would be like the default state for any food but as it turned out they were not dead i don't remember that line exactly so he turns to their guide and he he starts complaining about his wife and then the guide says something along the lines of well personally if it were me i'd whip the bitch about this guy's wife and it's a kid that offended me out of place exchange in a kid's movie right it's an odd thing to say so i didn't like that it's a kid i thought that wasn't a nice thing for him to say at least it wasn't the main character saying it about his own wife but still um and so i told dad that that movie is bad for that reason and he was like okay and he just taped over it i don't know that he had any opinions necessarily about baby secret of the lost legend but i did well you didn't like it and you got rid of it forever it was gone yep all right well anyway that's not what we're talking

more about baby secret of the lost legend so back to space camp screenplay was also by kct mitchell another interesting thing about this movie joaquin phoenix this is his first role and he was credited as leaf phoenix which i don't know maybe that was his name yeah well yeah his brother is river phoenix right they got cool names like with a last name like phoenix you can't go wrong like that's such a cool name dude um one other interesting thing uh and this is you know it's a little bit of a dark tone to it but uh sadly the very first time the crew ever viewed the final cut of space camp was literally one hour after the challenger disaster where the challenger spaceship blew up. Yes. And that was a problem for their movie. It's crazy. So the Challenger disaster, it was sadly caused by a weakened rubber O-ring in the right solid rocket booster which caused the rocket to break up mid-launch, killing the entire

crew, including a teacher who was going to teach her class from space. Like, dude, that sucks. Right. And this was a big mission because it was one of the first times an amateur was going into space. And arguably this setback not arguably tourism definitively like they shut down the space program for two and a half years after that and then like never even considered ever ever bringing a uh a civilian ever again only now are we finally getting space tourism i know it's so sad dude like the idea this killed the space industry but amazingly space camp's plot hinges around an error with the right solid rocket booster which causes the ship to launch with a space camp teacher and her class so a bunch of amateur people going in space and they went ahead and released it that year on schedule which you might argue is just you know poor timing and horrible taste um but yeah did they release it on schedule i thought i read in the imdb trivia that they did delay it i mean it

released i think like six months later um same year though poor uh director weiner it's really sad so the the movie uh it had a poor launch and it made 10 million dollars in theaters and i'm sure cost a lot more than that so it's very sad well it's very kind of traditional hollywood style of writing it is well written like every single character has their own little arc it's suspenseful and it's got a nice resolution and you know i have a few theories about this movie the main one is that jinx he was either trying to hurt or kill or harm people or doing it by accident but he only started doing it after max fixed him okay he may have been possibly trying to kill everyone in the shuttle whether on purpose or inadvertently um my other theory is that they all would have died in space i mean the premise is fairly unbelievable but i can yeah like so you're saying he's like a hal 9000 like malfunctioning robot computer entity that

for whatever reason you know maybe with good intentions basically tried to kill a bunch of people in a spaceship specifically i'm saying one event in the movie kicked off his murderous rampage and that was when he got broken by all the teenagers who are yelling commands at him and then fixed by max so uh just a little background on this movie it's about a space camp there's this lady astronaut named andy who's never actually been to space i think yeah she's never been to space they make friends with this robot and then they go to a shuttle which is going to do like a test run of its engines the robot causes it to malfunction and it blasts off into space they got to find their way back that's the movie when they introduce this robot the robot's name is jinx and the young boy is named max okay jinx they say is a prototype maintenance droid for the space station and this is interesting so this movie is actually like it's not our world it is

a sci-fi world because there is some random space station called the daedalus space station which does not exist in real life nope and there are sentient robots like uh like jinx right but interestingly enough the space station is under construction so it's not very far in the future you know right right it's like you know it's not a future sci-fi movie with high tech or anything it is our world but with two extra things which is a space station and a robot right and of course in our world now we do have space stations and robots yeah not not robots like jinx they say he was a maintenance droid for the space station but he's not going up because they quote unquote blew it on his shielding i'm not sure what that means i guess maybe radiation from the sun can cause damage to him i don't know maybe like shielding from peer pressure ignore all the people there's a reasonable explanation based on how he acts in this movie but they say specifically

his chips become unpredictable after about two hours okay i don't know what that means two hours of what because he's always running watching this movie i think what that means it was is that it was written by people who don't understand robots or computers the interesting thing here is that they seem to think that jinx is amazing and interesting because he is a robot what is actually an amazing and interesting about jinx is his artificial intelligence yes like it literally doesn't matter what body you put his intelligence into his artificial intelligence is insane like nothing like that exists he is he is as we talked about before an artificial general intelligent robot right and i'm sure you will talk about this later but in their world there is another artificially intelligent computer called nasa yeah that was another thing for this science sci-fi world there is artificial intelligence and it's in robots and computers so right and it's not

impressive good shielding would have been impressive but you know ai whatever right like this robot they built it and then we're just like okay whatever let's have him do random tasks around like he doesn't do anything he just rolls around talking to people and handing right he says in your hand as a kid i thought that was hilarious like oh that was the funniest joke our viewers have no idea how often we quoted that line oh my goodness and still do it's so funny it was in his hand because he put it in his hand that's where it was well that takes me to my next point so right about that part of the movie they say he's such a complex piece of machinery nasa hasn't been able to iron out all the bugs uh he's the world's only 27 million dollar handyman he's also quite literal and that's important for this theory just backing up slightly there was one thing i wanted to say just before this when she meets all of her students so when andy meets tish she is not

very nice in that scene to tish nice to anyone tish is like so it says something about like i want to you know search for intelligent life and then staring right at tish she says i know the feeling implying that tish is unintelligent and and tish totally notices too like the actor kind of gives her a look you know this is actually why i liked andy is i feel she's actually a very complex character but if she were just a nice teacher i wouldn't be interested in her but because she's like taking revenge on leah thompson's character just right off the bat like okay like wow this lady is like so serious let's walk through this whole scene because i got a lot to say about this scene so for and this has nothing to do with my theory by the way she's she's talking to all of her students that will be in her class and she talks to katherine who is leah thompson katherine loves her katherine knows who she is and is like wow it's you what are you doing here and then you

know she asks Catherine what she wants to do and Catherine's like I want to be the shuttle commander and she's like you're a pilot first of all though we we have to talk about so Leah Thompson's character she knows who Andy is she knows who Andy is and thinks she's great and knows that Andy is an amazing pilot for NASA who wants to be the first woman in space yes right and then she asked her the question what are you doing here which of course is like a jab at Andy whether she intended it or not because what is she doing at space camp she was supposed to be in space right now but she wasn't let into space so she has to be at space camp so of course andy is is insulted by that isn't that a valid question still like whether it's a jab whether it was intentional or not but then when andy's talking to leah thompson leah thompson says i want to be the first woman pilot in space which leah thompson knows is what andy wants to do and andy is way

further in her in her career than leah thompson is right yeah so i think understandably andy gets who is already in a bad mood gets in a worse mood because of that comment whether it was like going up to michael jordan and you know that michael jordan wants to score 200 baskets in one game and then he says so what do you want to do kid and you say i want to be the first athlete to score 200 baskets in one game it's not offensive just because you want to do it too well right it is if Michael Jordan was just fired from being a pro basketball player to go to like basketball player camp with a bunch of little kids. Well, I think that Andy is a very complex and interesting character. And what I liked about that part with Leah Thompson, she's trying to actually teach Leah Thompson a lesson, which is the same lesson that she has had to learn is that you don't always get what you want. She wanted to be in space. She can't go to space. So she's going to teach

Leah Thompson that you're not going to be the first captain. You're going to be the pilot or whatever yeah well leah thompson is pursuing a career path and it's not up to andy to decide leah thompson's career path well but it is she's the teacher it is up to her to decide her career path because she's the one who chooses their career paths katherine is there because she wants to learn about this one specific aspect of space travel so that she can do it later in her life but she is also there to try to teach them things right she probably sees that kevin maybe needs a little bit more leadership skills and so she gives him the leadership position the one thing we know about leah thompson is that she is a good pilot she flies to space camp in an airplane and by the way space camp apparently has a runway right next to its parking lot just in case you wanted to fly there i think it makes sense that she puts leah thompson in the role of pilot right because leah

thompson is a pilot i think it makes no sense because leah thompson is there to learn a skill and that skill is not what she's being allowed to learn. Right, but I'm saying this makes her, I think, a good character because she is consistent in her emotion. She didn't get what she wanted and now none of these kids are going to get what they want. Hey, did I say she's not a good character? She is definitely a good character. She may be not the nicest person, but I like her as a character. She was also really mean to Trish, like you said, and she wasn't very nice to Rudy either. She was not nice to Rudy. And it's the worst because she treats Trish like an idiot. And it turns out Trish is actually extremely intelligent. Trish is really smart. She's the smartest person there. And nothing ever comes from that. All right, back to my theory. At one point in the movie, Jinx is hiding in Max's closet for unknown reasons.

I don't know why Jinx just hangs out in Max's closet. Max put him there. Yeah, but why is he allowed to do this? Max has got something in there. It seems like people would have stuff for Jinx to do. I don't think he's allowed to. I think that's why he was hiding him in the closet. Like, he wasn't supposed to have the robot there. Okay. And then for the next, like, three scenes in a row, he's back in the closet, like, all the time. It seems like Jinx should have things to do other than hiring a closet all day. No, it is odd that no one cares about this robot. Yes, he's a $22 million robot. People should care. So, he's in Max's closet. Everyone starts yelling commands at him, and he breaks because he gets too many commands. This robot should be able to process multiple commands without breaking. Like, he, like, sparks and shuts down. Like, it's not even like he crashes and needs a reboot.

Like, he physically breaks. He has literal hardware problems. I mean, it's true. His chips become unstable. Like, they weren't lying. Like, this is hardware, not software. I mean, maybe a bit of both. Max takes him and fixes him. As he's fixing Jinx, he says, what a bunch of monkey clowns. He's talking about the boys who broke Jinx. He says, they ought to be zapped. Jinx, now fixed, starts to leave, and Max says, hey, where are you going? And Jinx says, to zap them while spraying sparks everywhere. So once again, here's an example of Jinx taking things literally. So this is where Max fixes Jinx, and Jinx goes haywire. Up to this point, Jinx had never showed any animosity or even ability to hurt anyone. The instant he's fixed, he rolls off to go and kill some kids. so uh there you go that's that's the start of my theory um is that also the end of your theory because more or less seems pretty much confirmed yep no okay well i got i got a few more points um

just so this scene wraps up with uh max he kind of like gives jinx a hug hug and he says you know you're really neat jinx and jinx says you too max and then max says friends forever and jinx says friends forever now remember jinx takes things literally right so jinx he's in max's closet again he tells kevin a secret way to get to the launch pad so he can go on a date with katherine but then andy comes looking for uh for kevin because he's skipping out on curfew and jinx tells andy where kevin is oh no they catch him and katherine skipping curfew kevin comes home chews out max and jinx is listening this whole time max runs away to be alone and jinx follows him at this point max says i wish i were far away i wish i were anywhere except for here i wish i was in space and then he cries and says i wish i was in space over and over jinx is watching this and then he wheels away max and jinx never interact with or see each other

again after this point of the movie so that was interesting because i thought this kid and this robot did a lot more together than that nope that's it for their relationship pretty much i mean yeah and as far as the robot is concerned you know max is going to die but he will get his wish yeah they'll be friends forever um okay so jinx then goes to talk to a sentient computer called nasa this computer is the most strange mystery of the movie i don't know what this computer is why it always sits in a dark room being unused. Why someone installed a SYNCIA computer. Why it talks like the master control program. Yeah. No, this computer is very strange, but only Jinx ever uses it. Jinx says put Max in space, and NASA says there is no Max listed in astronaut program. Interesting thing to note is... There is now. Yes, then Jinx says there is now. This has no effect on the movie. It doesn't matter that Jinx

put Max into the astronaut program that literally makes no difference in the movie so i don't know why that seems but also like that robot can just plug into a port and just add people to the astronaut program apparently jinx is pretty powerful i know this was the 80s but they apparently don't have any like security yeah well either that or um maybe jinx can connect to the key store uh get the key that he needs to elevate his privileges or log into someone else's account he can get the admin account access or something i don't know we don't know how jinx does this but nasa the computer scrolls through a list of people while searching the database it seems to be a real list of actual astronauts uh it includes some deceased astronauts that i checked and they are actually dead or they were at the time of the movie that list does include one member of the challenger crew ronald mcnair and it did not list him as deceased it listed him as flight okay that's good so anyway

that's interesting jinx is talking to nasa about possibilities of getting nasa into space he says how can we change engine test into liftoff uh nasa says worst case scenario thermal curtain failure he describes that if one engine has a thermal curtain failure they will explode or be forced to ignite the second booster and launch yeah jinx doesn't seem to i mean he he kind of a little objects like he says it's unacceptable for them to explode but then immediately goes along with it like he he asks what's the possibility of a thermal curtain failure and then nasa says one will happen every 4.9 million years right at which max won't live that long max needs thermal curtain failure max and jinx friends forever this this robot is insane right it's a homicidal robot well he wants to either send max to space or kill him he knows that that is the outcome here either space or death and he seems to be reassuring himself by

saying max and jinx friends forever i don't know i think well like even if max dies we're still right exactly and also if max dies they can never not be friends because max can't change that um yeah he says to nasa max needs thermal curtain failure uh then he jacks into nasa again and says thermal curtain failure max and jinx friends forever so the right engine starts to fail and just at the very last second they decide to initiate the launch sequence and avoid the explosion yeah i know we've already talked about how this nasa computer is a little bit confusing but like it can access a shuttle that is far away and cause it to have problems yeah against the will presumably of any technicians or anyone else working on that shuttle right like it can cause thermal curtain failure remotely so that's just strange this is not a very uh safe system that they have going on here i'll put it that way just to continue with my theory i have to mention this

this kind of kind of sort of counteracts my theory but jinx does show that he is interested in max's survival uh he's talking to nasa later and nasa tells him uh re-entry to landing will be 14 hours, but estimated oxygen supply is only 11 hours and 56 minutes. Jinx asks, Max will erase? And then NASA says, probability 100%. And then Jinx says, get Max out of space now. How? So he does not want Max to die, I guess, if he can help it. But he is a malfunctioning robot who caused a problem with the shuttle that had a very high likelihood of killing everyone. Yes. And then even if the problem didn't kill them, the following events would kill them, right? Like, he put them in space with no oxygen. Like, everything about this was designed to kill them. Interesting thing here, NASA says NASA is working on the problem. Jinx says NASA needs help and then exposes some lights in his body. I don't know what he's doing.

Like, I guess he's, like, adding his CPU power to NASA to help them solve the problem. But I guess they didn't come up with anything. Because the next time we see Jinx several scenes later, he's just wandering around aimlessly outside mission control saying, Jinx help NASA, Jinx help NASA, over and over. He's not helping NASA. The list were just lights. It didn't do anything. Right. He realized that at some point. I think this is a good evidence that he is broken. He's just wandering around outside saying, Jinx help NASA. He's not helping NASA. Jinx bursts into mission control. He's shouting, Jinx, put Max in space. Jinx, we'll get Max back over and over. Just confessing to his crime. Right. And I don't know what he plans to do. He has no plan. So Andy's husband says, how'd you know about Max, Jinx? And he says, Jinx and Max friends forever. It has nothing to do with that. The students are trying to contact Mission Control using Morse code.

They have no radio, so they can't talk to them. Jinx sees it and says, yo, Max. I don't know why. I mean, I guess he makes the connection that that is at least the students trying to communicate. It is not Max, but I don't know why he thinks Max can hear him. Security comes, they start to pick up Jinx. Andy's husband says, wait a minute, Jinx, how can you help NASA? Jinx just starts reading letters from the Morse code. He says, C-O-M-E-I-N-C-O-N-T-R-O-L, C-O-M-E-I-N-C-O-N-T-R-O-L. And then he reads them and says, come in control. his code and then luckily andy's husband says morse code morse code and then he corrects him again and says max's code some very key parts of this robot's programming were replaced with the word max right well okay so that that's about the end of the movie uh he says jinx i'm treating you to a can of oil jinx opens his mouth doesn't say anything uh mission control gets the message and

then it cuts back to drinks who's just swiveling his head left and right and that's the last we see of him so my theory here is just that from what i've told you jinx his i guess we can call it mental state um was degrading seriously from the point he was fixed and at the point that he comes to mission control he is no longer a functional robot he's just repeating things and shouting max right like nothing is working right in his brain anymore like he burst in there with no plan to do anything except confess i guess like he's just lucky he happened to see that button and realize it was morse code that definitely wasn't his plan and also yeah i mean there's no way he could have known that he came there with no purpose right i mean and also this does not redeem him in any way no he put them there like you don't put someone in mortal peril then save them be like i'm the hero oh yep that pretty much wraps it up for my theory about jinx uh he is a very broken robot

and he broke exactly when they broke him and max tried to fix him but of course max is just a little kid he doesn't know how to fix this robot how would he know how to fix this robot and this is by the way my my best evidence is that there's zero possible way that max could have fixed jinx well like all he has is like a screwdriver right he has one screwdriver and he just screws something quite possibly max did nothing and we don't know what max did but either jinx was broken then or probably max broke him more well i think that's a great theory and i agree with you that is one malfunctioning murderous robot yes so i also have the theory that they would have died in space basically once they got into space uh leah thompson said we're gonna die and then the hippie girl uh tish she says we're already dead i think they were already dead by that part right you could do it you could do a they were actually dead the whole time theory okay so there's this guy named chris haugen he wrote

like a one page report about space camp and it happens to be hosted on some university's website he says there are some key problems with space camp when they lift off katherine doesn't get buckled in and crashes into yeah that's a problem right he says that she would have died when taking off the shuttle puts three g's on the astronauts and since she fell from the top to the back of the shuttle in three times earth gravity she would have been seriously hurt and if katherine was dead or injured she couldn't have piloted them home and they would have died maybe andy could have done it but andy was incapacitated so right the oxygen tank bigger than any oxygen tank that a scuba diver would ever use right like it's huge and it bursts open and slams andy into the wall of the payload bay it should have crushed her like the amount of force coming from this giant compressed oxygen tank would have really seriously hurt her which it did i mean she she did fall in

conscious but then she got better right away she should have probably been dead also it should have pushed them off course because the force of this oxygen pushing the ship would have made it move going by you know newton's third law another problem is when they set up for re-entry they go into a spin and katherine has trouble getting out of the spin and then all of a sudden it's just magically fixed right uh chris haugen says that that wouldn't happen they couldn't just magically fix it like that and also even if they did that spin would have put them way off course from where they were trying to land they wouldn't have been at white sands anymore and they would have had nowhere to land yeah last thing he says is that when they're landing catherine is trying to maintain an angle of attack at 30 degrees in real life you want an angle of attack at 40 degrees because any less and the orbiter skips off the earth's atmosphere like a rock in a pond you know

you're skipping stones and bounces back into space he says this would make a huge problem because they would bounce back into space at 30 degrees and never return to earth since they would have the orbit would have been off they would have had too flat of an orbit they would have had to somehow like get further away and come back in and they they were probably running out of oxygen and all of those problems show that no matter what they would have died in space both of the pilots got seriously injured and incapacitated or dead and the pilot when she did try to land them did it wrong so so perhaps the end of the movie is jinx's hero fantasy maybe we don't know what's going on in the mind of that robot they like they died when they were launched the rest of the movie is in jinx's head well he could have imagined himself being a lot smarter and cooler than yeah he didn't you know he's very literal it's true he is very literal so i actually i really

like survival movies and i really like kids movies and i really i always have and i always will uh had to have a thing for robots i just gotta say i really do like space camp i think it is a a really fun survival movie for kids with a robot in it so what's not to like right it's got everything whatever i have to say about space camp i actually think it's a good movie i like it space camp is enhanced by the fact that you know now we know the robot was uh right it's like a precursor hell 9000 like you said like this robot is going off the rails for you know for the rest of the movie after it gets damaged right cool all right all right well this has been uh the popcorn isn't real with me torvald my brother leif eric thank you so much for listening opening music for this episode was provided by Christine. And remember, the popcorn isn't real.