The Adventures of the Electronic

The Adventures of the Electronic (1980) is a Soviet science-fiction musical for children directed by Konstantin Bromberg — watch it online on iFILM. Professor Gromov builds a robot named Electronic that is an exact copy of a real sixth-grader, Sergey Syroezhkin. The robot escapes the lab and makes his way into the city, where the two meet by accident.

Real-life twin brothers Yuri and Vladimir Torsuyev play the boy and his mechanical double — you genuinely cannot tell them apart on screen. Sergey sees an opportunity to skip school; Electronic wants something that cannot be programmed: to be human. Meanwhile a gang led by Stump is hunting the robot, planning to use him for museum heists.

Shot in three parts and running over three hours total, this became a fixture of Soviet childhood. The songs were memorized by generations; the central question — what makes a person real — lands gently for kids and sharply for everyone else. Watch The Adventures of the Electronic (1980) in full online on iFILM.