Honey, I Shrunk The Kids

In 1986 the new leadership at Disney, headed by Michael Eisner and Frank Wells, helped to spearhead an unprecedented number of new advertising campaigns. One such undertaking was the so-called “Together at Disney” campaign, fronted by an infamous TV commercial wherein the young children of a working family tearfully comfort one-another, as their parents are both too busy with their careers to spend time with them. The business-suited Mom and Dad notice this, guilt spreading over their faces, and promptly decide to cure their family’s ills with a vacation - at Walt Disney World! The commercial naturally concludes with a montage of the family all having a wonderful time together (at Disney) – eating ice cream, wearing Figment hats, meeting Mickey, etc.

Putting this aside for now, let’s traverse 3.2 miles worth of over-grown suburban backyard to review 1989’s Honey, I Shrunk The Kids.


Like Lord Of The Flies, but with giant cookies

Created under the working title of Teeny Weenies (seriously) and developed by Stuart Gordon, writer and director of Re-Animator (seriously,) the movie was helmed by first-time director (and last-minute replacement for the ill Gordon) Joe Johnson. A special-effects technician who’d worked on the original Star Wars trilogy (among many other films,) Johnson would go on to a successful career directing such films as Disney’s The Rocketeer, Jumanji, October Sky and 2011’s Captain America. While ostensibly a family adventure film, Honey, I Shrunk The Kids often skirts the line of the horror genre (albeit a domesticized horror,) with its mad scientist, experiment gone wrong and peril from giant insects.

Doing Ray Harryhausen proud

The entire concept behind the film is pretty silly, but many factors help to sell the gimmick well. The cast is uniformly on-point, particularly the four lead kids. The young actors commit to the terror that their characters face, convincingly screaming for dear life when facing scripted peril. Rick Moranis, ever the jovial every-nerd, keeps the movie grounded. His character, amateur inventor Wayne Szalinski, provides a warm and identifiable center to the film, and could’ve come across as a more sinister character in the hands of a different actor (he did shrink and then try to eat his son - sure it was an accident…) One wonders how differently the character (and movie as a whole) would’ve turned out had Gordon’s original choice of Chevy Chase portrayed Szalinski.

Beauty, ay?

At the other end of the warmth scale is familiar character-actor Matt Frewer as Szalinski’s neighbor, “Big Russ” Thompson. Waking up on the wrong side of the bed, the character spends his first waking moments yelling at a side of his neighbor’s house for waking him up early, and then spends an inordinately long morning loading his RV for the family’s fishing trip. First of all, shouldn’t he have woken up early to get on the road anyway? Was he planning on arriving at the lake after dark? And secondly, how the hell much stuff does this family need for a fishing trip? Thompson literally spends hours checking massive stockpiles of microwaveable foods and then loading armful-after-armful of supplies into his camper. How’s his family supposed to fit in there?

OK kids, we're ready to hunker down in the bomb shelter...

When he’s not packing the contents of the local Wal-Mart into his RV, Thompson is tormenting his eldest son “Little Russ” (no comment,) played by Thomas Wilson Brown, for quitting the high-school football team and not living up to his own athletic glories. Am I to believe that wiry beanpole Matt Frewer was once a star football player? To top it off, when he has to cancel the fishing trip, he lies to his friend that his wife is on her period, rather than admit his kids are missing(!?). While his anger at Szalinski is understandable (he did put his sons in mortal danger, after all,) it’s hard to sympathize with a character that’s been antagonizing everyone around him for the better part of 90 minutes. When he offers Szalinski a peacemaking handshake at the end of the film, I was rooting for Moranis to tell him to fuck off.

Domestic bliss

While Thompson may be a domineering bully to his kids and wife (Buffy The Vampire Slayer's Kristine Sutherland,) the Szalinski family is portrayed as quietly coming apart. Diane Szalinski (the late Marcia Strassman) is absent from the beginning of the film, staying with her mother following an argument with Wayne, and then going to work at her realtor job. Wayne, meanwhile, leaves the running of the house to his teenage daughter, Amy (Amy O’Neill,) while working tirelessly on his shrinking machine, and pointedly dismisses his young son, Nick (Robert Oliveri.) The fact that the bright young Nick was trying to get his father’s attention with a small model of the very shrinking machine Wayne created is telling.

Vindicate me, dammit!

Coming back to the commercial described earlier, there was much hullabaloo in the 1980s regarding the effects of double-working families on traditional parenting (the associated debate stretches back decades, of course, but gained a much wider discussion thanks to popular talk shows of the time,) and Disney joined the ranks of studios willing to mine the topic for commercial benefit. It wasn’t until my most recent viewing of Honey, I Shrunk The Kids (like many my age, I watched the movie a lot when I was a kid – I mean come on, it had Tummy Trouble on front of it!) that I realized the title of the film was a confession. When the children are physically shrunk in size, it’s merely a physical manifestation of the fact that the Szalinski children were already marginalized by their parents, while the Thompson kids were emotionally belittled (see what I did there?) by their father. It also creates a convenient story-telling device for Diane and Wayne to put aside their own issues for the welfare of their children, and for Russ to consider how his behavior affects the relationships with his friends and family.

Perhaps when the whole ordeal was over, the families went for a visit to Disney World. Problem solved!

Wayne Szalinski, you've just un-shrunk your kids - what are you gonna do now??

Released the same weekend as Tim Burton’s seminal Batman, the movie was a surprise hit - a clear family-friendly counter-programming success (being a decent alternative for those who couldn’t get into the sold-out superhero film surely helped.) Before long it has started its own decade-spanning franchise, with two sequels, a TV show, and a 3D attraction at EPCOT – so parents could take their own neglected children to an attraction about reformed parents! Next time, we’ll take a look at the Szalinski family's next adventure, in which Wayne blows up his toddler (it’s not like it sounds – that would’ve been much more entertaining than what we ended up with.)

Throw me a frickin' bone...