Forty years later, Johnny 5 is still alive. Okay, maybe not literally. But for anyone who grew up with Short Circuit, it probably takes only a few seconds of seeing that familiar robot rolling around on screen to bring back a whole lot of 1980s memories.
Released in 1986, Short Circuit was exactly the kind of family movie that decade seemed especially good at making. It had comedy, action, romance, a little danger and a robot who somehow became the character everybody wanted to take home. And according to Steve Guttenberg, making Johnny 5 feel real required a lot more human help than audiences ever saw.
Steve Guttenberg remembers working with Johnny 5
During a recent Retro Con panel, Guttenberg looked back at making Short Circuit and what it was like sharing scenes with a robot that obviously was not capable of acting on its own. There was no sophisticated digital character standing beside him.
Johnny 5 was a physical creation operated by a team of puppeteers, while Tim Blaney, who provided the character’s voice, would perform the dialogue on the set. For Guttenberg, that made a huge difference.
If he allowed himself to buy into what was happening, Johnny 5 stopped feeling like a machine surrounded by technicians and started feeling like another character in the scene. That was the trick. The actors had to believe in Johnny before the audience could.
Click on the media bar below to hear Steve Guttenberg talk about making Short Circuit and what it was really like working with Johnny 5 and the team that brought him to life.
John Badham knew how to make an ’80s crowd-pleaser
It certainly did not hurt that Short Circuit had John Badham behind the camera. By then, Badham had already directed Saturday Night Fever and WarGames, and he had also made the high-tech action thriller Blue Thunder.
That background made him a pretty great fit for Short Circuit. The movie needed the technology to be convincing enough that you accepted Johnny 5 as a robot, but it could never lose the warmth underneath everything.
Guttenberg also had a familiar co-star in Ally Sheedy, who had previously worked with Badham on WarGames. Put all of that together and Short Circuit feels like a very particular snapshot of what mainstream movies could be in the mid-’80s.
It could be an action movie for a few minutes, turn into a comedy, get sentimental and then somehow convince you to care deeply about a military robot discovering what it means to be alive.
Why everybody fell in love with Johnny 5
Johnny 5 was the movie’s secret weapon. He starts as military hardware. Then lightning changes everything.
Suddenly he wants information. He wants to understand the world. He discovers television, books, friendship and eventually the idea that being dismantled would mean something much more serious than simply being switched off. And somehow it works.
The design helped. Johnny had those huge expressive eyes and a body that could communicate surprisingly well despite being made out of metal. But personality was everything.
Johnny was curious, funny, innocent and occasionally exhausting. He behaved like somebody discovering the entire world all at once because, basically, he was. That made him easy to root for.
The soundtrack was pure ’80s
You cannot really revisit Short Circuit without talking about the music. El DeBarge performed “Who’s Johnny,” which became closely associated with the movie and gave it another unmistakably 1980s ingredient.
It is one of those songs where hearing the opening can instantly take you back to the era. That was Short Circuit in general.
Robots. Big hair. Synths. Action. Comedy. A love story. A catchy pop song. Nobody was pretending it was trying to reinvent cinema. It wanted you to have a good time.
Forty years later, Johnny 5 still has something
Technology has obviously changed enormously since 1986. A modern version of Johnny 5 could probably be created with digital effects that nobody involved with the original film could have imagined.
But there is something charming about knowing the Johnny 5 that Guttenberg and Sheedy worked opposite was actually there. There were puppeteers just outside the frame. Blaney was performing the voice. Actors had to use their imaginations.
And the end result made generations of kids believe that little robot was alive. Forty years later, that still counts for something.
If you haven’t seen it, or just want to revisit the ’80s and get away from the world for a while, Short Circuit is available on DVD, Blu-ray, digital platforms such as Amazon and streaming on Disney+ and Tubi.
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