Newton Crosby

Newton Crosby is a secondary character in the 1986 science fiction film Short Circuit, played by Steve Guttenberg.

In the movie, Crosby is a programmer at Nova Robotics and the main designer of Johnny 5 and the other robots in the SAINT prototype series, alongside his friend and co-worker Ben Jahrvi. He is a somewhat naive scientist who is very vocal in his disgust over the use of his projects for violent military use, and is a constant foil to the movie's antagonists, Dr. Howard Marner and Captain Skroeder. Like them, however, he at first does not believe eventual love interest Stephanie Speck's claim that Johnny Five is sentient, instead believing the wayward robot to be malfunctioning. It is only until he is 'kidnapped' by Johnny and places the robot through a series of rigorous technical and emotionally-based tests that he is convinced. He is, sadly, unable to convince the paranoid and hell-bent Nova of this fact, and is forced to watch them destroy Johnny, he later (after he was fired) learns to his relief the robot was just a copy. As of Short Circuit 2, he has given up trying to get his old job from Nova and is living with Stephanie in a family ranch in Montana.