Honey, I Shrunk The Kids (1989) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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The family that shrinks together, stays together.

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is a new take on an old idea. It creates a family friendly and youth-oriented look at the miniaturization subgenre and explores the real-world implications and dangers of size changing.

First Impressions

The trailer for this Walt Disney Pictures film depicts a scientist working out of his home on a new shrinking ray which accidentally affects his children. He unknowingly dumps his shrunken children into the trash on the other side of the yard, and they must make their way back to the house through a jungle of grass. Their adventure will have them avoiding things that wouldn’t bother normal sized people, like insects, sprinklers, and a lawnmower. Will Rick Moranis be able to rescue his kids and return them to normal size? A new take on the size-change formula is in full effect in Honey, I Shrunk The Kids.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

The film introduces young Nick and teenager Amy Szalinski (Robert Oliveri & Amy O’Neill) children of scientist and inventor Wayne Szalinski (Rick Moranis) and real-estate broker Diane (Marcia Strassman). The children are concerned that their parents had a fight and Diane spent the night elsewhere. Wayne is scatterbrained and busy working on a device to miniaturize matter, which so far only succeeds in causing it to explode. The next door neighbor, “Big” Russ Thompson (Matt Frewer), is upset that the Szalinski’s are causing such a ruckus on a Saturday morning. He is consoled by his wife, Mae (Kristine Sutherland), who tries to calm him down and help him pack for their camping trip.

Young Ron Thompson (Jared Rushton) is “practice” camping in the backyard, but his older brother “Little” Russ Thompson (Thomas Brown) is not very excited about spending time with his parents, telling his Dad that “fishing is your thing, not mine.” Teenage Russ notices Amy dancing in her kitchen, obviously attracted to her, while Ron shows animosity towards nerdy Nick. After Wayne leaves for work, Ron accidentally knocks a baseball into the attic window, which fires up the shrinking machine. Nick takes Ron up to the attic and is shrunk by the ray. Amy and Russ realize that the younger kids haven’t returned and go upstairs to look and are also caught in the ray. The baseball falls off the machine, causing it to shut down.

At a local science conference, Wayne presents his miniaturization hypothesis to a group of scientists, who mock his insane idea. Returning home, he smashes parts of his machine upset that it doesn’t work. He cleans up the mess and takes out the trash, which happens to include four miniaturized kids. Trapped on the opposite side of the backyard from the house, the two Szalinski children and the two Thompson children realize that they must get back to the house and get Wayne to enlarge them. They are instantly confronted with a large river (probably only a trickle of water) and a giant butterfly which spooks them. Russ and Nick get separated from the others after hitching a ride on a bee.

Wayne realizes what has happened to the kids after stepping on a miniaturized piece of furniture in the attic. He runs outside, shooing a bee that is buzzing his face. To avoid stepping on the grass, and potentially the kids, he gets a pair of stilts and mounts a pair of binoculars on a helmet. The leg of the stilt gets caught on the garden hose and accidentally turns on the sprinklers which causes large “bombs” of water to fall around the kids, nearly drowning Amy. The parents become concerned about the missing kids with the Thompsons reporting it to the police. Wayne tells Diane what actually has happened just before the police arrive to talk to them. He tells the officers his kids are in the backyard.

The kids befriend an ant, who Ron nicknames “Antie,” and use it to carry them to the house faster than they can walk. That night they find a LEGO brick to sleep in. Wayne and Diane inform the Thompsons what really happened, and while macho “Big” Russ is upset, he is also visibly concerned about his children. The kids ward off a scorpion that attacks them and kills Antie, before settling in for the night. The next morning the senior Szalinksi’s are awakened by the sound of a lawnmower. Tommy (Carl Steven) has stopped by to use the remote controlled lawn mower that Nick showed him the day before. They get him to stop and send him away, before continuing to use magnifying lenses to search the grass.

The Szalinksi’s dog, Quark, finds the kids in the backyard and they grab ahold of his fur to get a ride inside. Quark jumps on the table to “tell” Wayne he has found the kids, and Nick falls into a bowl of Cheerios and milk. Wayne is about to eat him, but notices the small speck at the last moment. The Szalinskis and the Thompsons take their small children up to the attic, and Nick helps his Dad figure out why the machine worked the previous day. Testing the process on “Big” Russ, who volunteers trepidatiously, the children are all revived to their normal sizes. The film ends with the two families celebrating Thanksgiving with an enlarged turkey for them, and a giant milkbone for Quark.

“If he wants to feel big, he should act big” – ‘Big’ Russ Thompson

History in the Making

Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, along with 1987s Innerspace helped to reinvigorate interest in the size-change sci-fi film at the end of the 1980s. Rather than go with the more mature and bawdy style like Joe Dante’s film, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was a family-friendly adventure produced by Walt Disney Studios. It featured four young protagonists to appeal to a more youthful audience, as many adventure stories from the 80s did (like The Goonies, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, or Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure), but also included four comedic adults to entertain the older audience members. Interestingly, most of the actors that portrayed the parents all had comedic backgrounds from television. Rick Moranis had gotten his start on SCTV, Matt Frewer portrayed the “computer-generated” Max Headroom in a UK series, plus advertisements for Pepsi, Marcia Strassman was a series regular on M*A*S*H and Welcome Back Kotter, while Kristine Sutherland would go on to play Buffy Summers mother in Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

The film also marked the debut of Joe Johnston as a film director. Getting his start as a visual effects artist and art director on the Star Wars trilogy and the first two Indiana Jones films, Johnston began working to help plan sequences and produce other films, like Howard the Duck and Willow. His work would include fan favorite films such as The Rocketeer, Jumanji, and Captain America: The First Avenger. Undoubtedly, some of the success of this film is due to Johnston having a strong background in visual effects, and how it would interact with production footage. He may have been one of the few choices (aside from top tier effects heavy directors like Spielberg and Zemeckis) that could have pulled off the production, while still maintaining the focus on characters and story.

Genre-fication

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is the third major release dealing with shrinking during the 1980s. The first was the lamentable The Incredible Shrinking Woman with Lily Tomlin, and the second was the aforementioned Innerspace. While Innerspace was a modern interpretation of films like Fantastic Voyage, this film pulls more from The Incredible Shrinking Man and adventure films of the 50s. The Incredible Shrinking Man was a story about a man who encounters a mysterious mist and begins to shrink a little at a time, until he wastes away into nothingness. Honey doesn’t have as dire a story line, but does concern itself with the struggle and difficulty of a miniaturized person interacting with elements of everyday life. The children must face the absurdly long trek from the backyard to the house, while avoiding mostly what to them appear as giant insects.

Rather than dealing with the scientific realities of shrinking or creating a darker, more realistic sci-fi film, this film, being a Disney effort, revisited the adventurous family films of yesteryear. The exploration of the gigantic backyard and the adventures the kids have in this wilderness setting is akin to popular juvenile fiction stories in books and film. One of the characters makes a reference that they “are not in Kansas anymore,” an obvious nod to The Wizard of Oz, where characters must undertake a similar trek to return home. But the film feels also like a number of modern adventure tales with young protagonists like The Goonies and in a small way The Flight of the Navigator. It ends up being part action movie, with the kids riding ants and bees, and fighting off a scorpion, and part teen drama. The kids’ struggle here is also exacerbated due to the friction between the two sets of siblings, but also enhanced with a small (pun intended) love story.

Societal Commentary

Unlike many science-fiction films that focus on larger societal problems, or create a parable or metaphor for the human struggle using alien races or future civilizations, Honey, I Shrunk The Kids shows things as they really are. The films’ main societal issue is apparently normal teen (and pre-teen) angst and issues with their parents. The film opens by showing the audience (not too subtly) the parallels between Nick and “Little” Russ. While one is a teen and the other a pre-teen, they are both desperate to have their respective father’s affection. Nick wants Wayne to pay attention to the amazingly and accurately detailed model he created of his fathers shrink ray. Russ, on the other hand, wants his father to see him for what he is, and stop foisting the older Thompson’s ideas of masculinity and manhood on his son. Russ Jr. doesn’t want to play football or go camping, but is scared to tell his father these things since that is where much of the attention that Russ Sr. gives his son is wrapped up.

Ron Thompson, who has adopted his father’s macho attitudes, takes pleasure in bullying young Nick, who looks much like his father; nebbish and bespectacled. The problem with Ron’s attitude is that he’s never actually taken the time to get to know Nick, who is about his age, yet smaller. Ron takes the life lessons that he sees his father providing (by example) and plays them out in his own life. Through the course of the film, he comes to understand that Nick is actually a pretty cool, and smart kid and they are finally able to put aside their differences and become friends. Russ, on the other hand, has taken notice of Amy, as seen when he “accidentally” watches her dancing in the kitchen. His teenage hormones are running rampant, something that Diane is worried about when she realizes what has happened to the kids. Amy has never taken the time to notice Russ. She is busy living a more “popular” lifestyle with her friends at the mall. When they finally share a kiss in the third act, she admits that “she was stupid” for not paying more attention to something that was right under her nose.

And this is the crux of the film. Everything that these characters take for granted everyday is upended and both the kids and the parents get a chance to understand what matters the most in their life. Big Russ, for all of his bluster and machismo, is a thoughtful and caring individual, which apparently only his wife can see. She runs interference between the two Russes as their ideals continually butt heads. He too has never given the Szalinski’s a second thought, but comes to respect Wayne enough that he is willing to risk his safety by having the shrink ray tested on himself. Wayne too comes to the realization of what he is missing by ignoring his children. The two fathers are more alike than they would admit or realize. And by the end, they put aside any preconceived biases and work together to return their children to them, safe and sound.

The Science in The Fiction

The reasons the film gives for having a home-brew scientist making a shrinking ray are very interesting. Wayne is working to “reduce the size of bulky payloads and fuel supplies,” for the space program, as he mentions in his presentation at the convention. Being able to reduce the amount of fuel for long term missions so that space vehicles could carry hundreds or thousands of times as much would definitely be a beneficial advancement in the late 80s cold war space race. Wayne mentions how matter is made up of mostly empty space. His invention would “proportionally reduce the amount of empty space in any given object” thereby shrinking it. Unfortunately, given the conservation of energy, the object would still have the same mass. This is not addressed in the film unfortunately, since four shrunken kids in a garbage sack would have weighed in at several hundred pounds, making Wayne’s trip to the rear of the backyard a much more difficult trip, and one that would surely tip him off that something weird was going on.

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is also one of several films from the 80s dealing with home grown scientists. Following in the history of wacky Disney science-comedies, like The Absent Minded Professor and The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, this film is more focused on the amazing aspects of the “what if?” science moments rather than the actual real-world physics. It also joins a list of other 80s sci-fi related films that feature parents (or parent surrogates) performing homemade science experiments. There’s of course Rand Peltzer in Gremlins who designs all sorts of weird time saving devices in an attempt to make the next “as seen on TV” product. Even Doc Brown, from Back to the Future, creates a fully functional time machine from a home-brew remodel of a DeLorean. With technological elements becoming easier to purchase in the real world, it’s no wonder that television and film scientists were starting to assemble their own devices, like the academics from Ghostbusters, who assemble “unlicensed nuclear reactors” plus a host of other devices to trap ghosts. Plenty of non-sci-fi films also featured kids and adults alike, building more devices in their homes, whether it’s Paul Stephens building an atomic device for school science fair in The Manhattan Project, or David using his home computer to hack into WOPR in WarGames.

The Final Frontier

The success of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids inevitably led to a string of sequels and spin-offs. In 1992, Randal Kleiser directed Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, which takes a 180-degree turn by having Wayne enlarge his two-year old son Adam into a giant. The entire slate of actors playing the Szalinski’s returned plus Lloyd Bridges and Keri Russell as Nick’s babysitter. Five years later a direct-to-video film, Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, with only Moranis returning, was released to mostly poor reviews. Still Disney chose to capitalize on the property as a whole, creating a “4D” ride initially at EPCOT called Honey, I Shrunk The Audience. It was a theater setup that had interactive elements to simulate the audience being shrunk. The success of the initial ride allowed for the entire setup to be repeated at Disneyland, and both the Tokyo and Paris parks as well. It was removed from the parks in 2010 to be replaced by the return of Captain EO, which coincidentally was the ride it replaced in 1994.

At present there is talk that a new reboot/sequel called Shrunk is in production, to be directed by Joe Johnston, who has not been involved with the franchise since this original film. The advent of CGI and enhanced special effects have led to the creation of several other miniaturization films in the last decade including the Matt Damon film Downsizing, and the superhero films Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp. As with other sci-fi films, plot ideas like this work best when they are not directly about the technology, but instead involve relatable characters and interesting plots. Honey, I Shrunk The Kids provides all this in a family friendly package that can still bring a smile to audiences’ faces.

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