Johnny Five is alive at the ‘Short Circuit’ house in Astoria (2024)

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Short Circuit house The “Short Circuit” house in Astoria and owner Rich Bates. The house was a filming location for the 1986 movie and served as the home of Ally Sheedy’s character, Stephanie Speck. (Samantha Swindler/Samantha Swindler/ The Oregonian)

Visitors to Astoria can now stay overnight in the house that was the prime filming location for a beloved 1980s children’s action film.

We’re talking, of course, about the “Short Circuit” house.

Located near the base of the Astoria-Megler Bridge, the bright teal house with a stunning view of the lower Columbia River was the home of Ally Sheedy’s character Stephanie Speck in the 1986 film “Short Circuit.”

The movie follows the adventure of military robot Number Five who, after being struck by lightning, gains sentience and escapes the robotics laboratory where he was created. Number Five ends up at Stephanie’s home, where she helps hide him from the military contractors who want to reprogram him. (In the sequel, the robot is named Johnny Five, a nickname he doesn’t give himself until the final moments of the first film.)

“When I was a kid, I watched it all the time,” said the home’s current owner, Richard Bates. “It was definitely one of my favorite movies.”

Bates grew up in Vancouver, Washington. He first saw the “Short Circuit” house when he was 10 years old on a family vacation in Astoria. Bates remembers begging his father to drive up the steep hill to the house so he could glimpse it from the back of their Ford Taurus station wagon.

“We didn’t get to really stop,” he said. “We got one pass and I’m like, ‘Oh my God.’ I knew it was the place.”

Over the years, Bates would make occasional pilgrimages to Astoria to see the house from his favorite childhood movie. It was a private home not open to the public, but he’d take a photo of it from the road.

In 2019, he was still living in Vancouver but traveling most of the time for his job in railroad track maintenance – and he hated it.

“I was kind of getting burnt out with life, and I was going through my phone and saw a picture I had taken in front of the house a year and a half before,” he said. “I literally popped up and was like, ‘This is it.’”

Like the bolt of lightning that brought Number Five to life, Bates was struck by inspiration.

He would buy the “Short Circuit” House and turn it into a fan-focused bed and breakfast.

It seemed like destiny. The house was for sale, and 45 days later Bates purchased the three-bedroom, 1889-built house for $345,000 and moved to Astoria. He opened it to overnight rentals in July 2021.

“I went from swinging a sledgehammer to making beds and maintaining a house,” he said.

Bates restored the home to its movie look, giving it a fresh coat of paint and adding hand railings around the wrap-around porch, which had been put in place by the film crew and removed after shooting.

Only exterior shots of the house were filmed in Astoria, but Bates has decorated the home’s interior with a simple, retro decor befitting the 1980s.

Some of Bates’ movie memorabilia – what must be the world’s largest ode to “Short Circuit” – is displayed throughout the home.

There’s a ticket stub from a 1987 screening attended by Princess Diana and Prince Charles, early conceptual drawings of Number Five by artist Syd Mead, an original script, and a letter from Eric Allard, whose Allfx company designed the robot.

Bates also has the personal scrapbook of Arvi and Christine Severson, the couple who owned the house at the time of filming in 1985. It includes photos of the crew, documentation of the home renovations they did for the film, as well as newspaper articles about the production.

Bates has added a few Easter eggs around the house for hard-core fans. There’s a raccoon statue on the front porch (Stephanie pets a raccoon there in the movie) and a bronze grasshopper in the living room (Number Five accidentally crushes a grasshopper, thus learning the concept of death). A Beware of Dog sign on the front column is a replica of the one in the movie.

One element of the film hasn’t aged well: the casting of white actor Fisher Stevens and his appearance in brownface as Indian robotics scientist Ben Jabituya. In a 2021 interview, Stevens said the role, “definitely haunts me. I still think it’s a really good movie, but I would never do that part again. The world was a different place in 1986, obviously.”

Visitors won’t find any photos of Stevens’ character at the “Short Circuit” house, though there are several photos of Ally Sheedy and director John Badham, a Thai movie poster featuring the movie’s male lead, Steve Guttenburg, and a Number Five in every room.

While it wasn’t the hit of that other 1980′s children’s action film shot in Astoria – “The Goonies” grossed $125 million when it opened in 1985, “Short Circuit” raked in $41 million the following year ­­– Number Five inspired legions of young fans. Bates hears from guests who grew up to become engineers based on their love of the movie.

“It changed their lives,” he said.

In perhaps the greatest movie marketing blunder of the 1980s, there was never an officially licensed Number Five toy, even after “Short Circuit 2″ came out with a plot around toy manufacturing. But fans filled the void by constructing their own versions of the robot. Online communities around “Short Circuit” are still thriving today. One Facebook group — Johnny 5 Replica Builders & Fans — has close to 23,000 members.

The opening of the “Short Circuit” house has reinvigorated that fan base. A small group of super fans who met online have gathered annually at the house since 2021 for what they dubbed BozoCon. (“Hello bozos” being an insult famously uttered by Number Five.)

The group includes Mike Morgan of Tualatin, who built popular fan website johnny-five.com more than 20 years ago.

When Morgan was about 8 years old, his dad surprised him with a trip to the California Museum of Science and Industry (now the California Science Center), where a Number Five robot was on display.

“I was meeting my hero,” Morgan said. “It wasn’t a cartoon. It wasn’t CGI. It was real, and you could go up to him, you could get your picture with him. I just thought that was the neatest thing in the world.”

By 2000, Morgan, then 21, was learning how to code, and as an experiment he built a website filled with nostalgia for the movie. “Short Circuit” fans soon flocked to the johnny-five.com message board, where many were trying to build their own robots. The site was getting 30,000 visitors a month.

“I was quite astonished by the popularity of it,” Morgan said.

A decade later, the site was bombarded by spammers and went dormant. Morgan revived a bare-bones version of it three years ago – around the same time Bates purchased the “Short Circuit” house.

Virginia Smith, an artist and music teacher living in Fort Worth, Texas, connected with Bates after he purchased the house. A regular at BozoCon, Smith also created much of the fan artwork throughout the “Short Circuit” house.

She first saw the movie when she was 13 years old and became Number Five’s biggest fan. As a teen, she was so obsessed with the film, her mother took her to L.A. to meet the producers, and to Astoria to see the house.

Number Five “was so pure and genuine and full of life and excitement about being alive,” Smith said. “It just resonated with me because I have a melancholy streak, and that was something that just made life come alive. I just enjoyed the message of the movie so much about how precious life was. It just made a difference for me.”

Bates has bigger plans for the house. He hopes to turn the basem*nt into a toy museum and show off his massive collection of 1980s action figures. He wants to get a life-size Johnny Five. Maybe, BozoCon could evolve into a public event.

So far, visitors are loving the house. A guest book in the kitchen has messages from travelers across the country who’ve described the stay as “the perfect place to live out your ‘80s dreams” and a “bucket list trip.”

“Short Circuit came to theaters when I was 13,” one guest wrote. “To now share the movie, your house and Astoria with my daughter that’s almost the same age has been a dream come true.”

“Just about every day somebody’s really happy about something that I did,” Bates said. “It always feels good.”

-- Samantha Swindler covers features for The Oregonian/OregonLive and Here is Oregon. Reach her at sswindler@oregonian.com.

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