Honey, I Blew Up the Kid

Plot

Five years after inventor Wayne Szalinski accidentally shrunk his children, his family have moved to Nevada, and welcomed a new son, mischievous two-ish-year old Adam. Wayne’s wife Diane leaves on a Friday with their daughter Amy for college, leaving Wayne to look after Adam and their teenage son Nick, who struggles with puberty. He develops a crush on Mandy Park, who Wayne later arranges to babysit Adam. One Saturday, Wayne takes his sons to Sterling Labs, where he has constructed a device which could make objects grow. He tests it out on Adam’s toy Big Bunny. However, when Wayne and Nick’s backs are turned, Adam retrieves his toy and is zapped by the machine, which appears to short circuit and not enlarge the targeted object.

Back home, Adam and Big Bunny are exposed to electrical waves from the microwave oven and grow in size, now seven feet tall. Wayne and Nick try to take Adam back to the lab to reverse the process, but are caught by Wayne’s superior Doctor Charles Hendrickson, who dislikes Wayne, later discovering his folly. Diane returns home and discovers the truth. Wayne and Diane drive to a warehouse and retrieve Wayne’s shrink ray to turn Adam back to normal. When Mandy arrives to babysit Adam, Nick calms her down when she sees the gigantic toddler. Adam is exposed to a television’s electrical waves and grows to fourteen feet, before escaping through a wall.

Nick and Mandy search for him, but they and Adam are taken into custody, Adam placed into a truck. Wayne and Diane return home, finding the smug Hendrickson waiting for them. He has summoned Clifford Sterling, the company chairman, with the plan to fire Wayne and experiment on Adam. Sterling arrives, praising Wayne when he admits his mistake and agrees to help Adam, firing the rude Hendrickson as well. Adam grows even larger, escaping confinement, and heads for Las Vegas, pursued by his family and the authorities. Adam mistakes Nick and Mandy for toys and puts them in his overalls pocket.

Hendrickson gets permission to board a military helicopter and tranquilise Adam. Wayne needs Adam to stand still for twelve seconds so he can be shrunk. At first, he tries using Big Bunny to pacify Adam but it backfires when Wayne suggests his son takes a nap (which he hates). After wandering through Las Vegas, Adam saves the escaped Nick and Mandy in a sports car from falling off the Kicking Lady of Glitter Gulch (Fremont Street) and puts the car inside his pocket again, before pursuing an ice cream truck driven by Marshall Brooks to distract him away from the city. However, he continues to grow even larger and heads towards the Hard Rock Café, where he plays the lit up guitar. Hendrickson arrives in the helicopter shooting tranquilizer cartridges at Adam, hitting the guitar instead and causing him to drop the guitar, crying from electric shock. Diane convinces Wayne to enlarge her so she can hug Adam, preventing Hendrickson from harming her son and getting Adam to stand still for the needed time period for the shrinking ray to work. Wayne then fires the shrink ray, returning Adam and Diane to normal size. Hendrickson arrives, attempting to justify his actions, but Diane punches him in the face.

In the closing scene, Nick and Mandy are revealed to have been shrunk inside the car from inside Adam's pocket to the size of insects, only to be quickly found by Wayne. The only problem left is to shrink gigantic Big Bunny to normal size.

Cast

Production

The film was not originally written as a sequel to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Originally titled Big Baby, it was about a toddler who grew to giant size by a freak accident involving a growth ray and eventually terrorized Las Vegas in a non-violent, yet Godzillaesque way. Disney saw the possibilities of making this into a sequel to Honey and rewrote the script. Whereas most of the characters from Big Baby were rewritten as characters from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, there was no character in the original that "Amy Szalinski" could replace, so she is seen going away to college in the beginning of the film.

Casting

Rick Moranis returns from the original film to portray "wacky" inventor Wayne Szalinski. Also returning is his wife, Diane, who is portrayed by Marcia Strassman. Amy O'Neill and Robert Oliveri return to portray the Szalinski children, Amy and Nick. Nick has matured in his personality and interests since the last film. He is still considered "nerdy", but has taken more interest in girls and guitars.

Casting director Renee Rousselot searched over 1,000 small children for someone to portray Adam, the newest addition to the Szalinski clan. She searched for mostly three- to four-year-old boys because a younger child was thought to be problematic. She came across twins Daniel and Joshua Shalikar, from New Jersey and immediately cast them in December 1990. One twin would act in the morning, while the other was eating lunch or taking a nap. Baby consultant Elaine Hall Katz and director Randal Kleiser would plan the twins' scenes a week in advance. Tom Smith reported that, "On his own, Dan was almost too adventuresome to repeat one move, and Josh seemed very cautious. Put them together and they could do anything." However, the film did have difficulties in working with such small children, and one crew member later remarked it was "like playing hopscotch on hot coals". At the time, the Shalikar twins were scheduled to appear in two more Honey films. They did appear once, but were recast in Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves.

In the film, Nick has a crush on a girl named Mandy Park, played by Keri Russell in her first feature film. John Shea portrays Dr. Charles Hendrickson, who is scheming to get Wayne's control of the project, while Lloyd Bridges portrays Clifford Sterling, the owner of Sterling Labs.

Fred Rogers and Richard Simmons are also seen in videos in TV scenes in the film.

Direction

Randal Kleiser, of Grease and White Fang fame, was chosen to direct this film, replacing Joe Johnston. Kleiser would return to film with the cast in the 3D show, Honey, I Shrunk the Audience, which was at several Disney parks until 2010. Like its predecessor, and Grease, Honey, I Blew Up the Kid had animated opening credits.

Production began on June 17, 1991. Filming took place in Simi Valley, California for the parts involving the Szalinskis' house. Also used extensively was well known places in Las Vegas such as the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, the Mirage Hotel, and Fremont Street. The water park where Nick worked and where Mandy is first introduced is Wet 'n Wild in Las Vegas. It closed in 2004, twelve years after the film.

Special effects were used heavily throughout the film, but some were not. When Adam knocks down his bedroom's door, production designer Leslie Dilley created a set with miniature furniture about four feet away from the camera, while the adult actors would be about fifteen feet away. Kleiser recalled, "Danny was generally better at improvising and fresh reactions. Josh was better at following directions, so we would alternate."

Lawsuit before release

Disney would later find itself the subject of a lawsuit as a result of the film. The suit was filed in 1991 by Mark Goodson Productions director Paul Alter, who claimed to have come up with the idea of an oversized toddler after babysitting his granddaughter and watching her topple over building blocks. He wrote a screenplay titled "Now, That's a Baby!", which had not been made into a film but had received some sort of treatment beforehand. Alter claimed there were several similarities between the movie and his script, which consisted of the baby daughter of two scientists falling victim to a genetic experiment gone wrong instead of an enlarging ray. The case went to trial in 1993, with the jury finding in Alter's favor. Disney was forced to pay $300,000 in damages.

Box office

The film opened on July 17, 1992 to 2,492 theatres, almost twice as many as the first film. It was No. 1 on opening weekend with $11,083,318, and grossed $58,662,452 in the U.S.

Critical

The film has received generally mixed reviews. It has a "rotten" rating of 41% at Rotten Tomatoes. Desson Thompson and Hal Hinson, both writers from the Washington Post, agreed that the film was "a one-joke film". Roger Ebert, from the Chicago Sun-Times, said that Adam "didn't participate in the real world but simply toddled around".

Soundtrack

Intrada Records released the record in 1992, in time for the film's release. The score was composed and conducted by Bruce Broughton, who would return to provide the score for Honey, I Shrunk the Audience. "Stayin Alive" by the Bee Gees appears in the film. So does "Loco-Motion" by Carole King, Gerry Goffin, and "Ours If We Want It" written by Tom Snow and Mark Mueller. The Soundtrack album consists of just the score.

Track listing

1. "Main Title" – 3:03
2. "To the Lab" – 1:53
3. "Adam Gets Zapped" – 0:35
4. "Putting on Weight?" – 1:19
5. "Macrowaved" – 3:15
6. "How'd She Take It?" – 3:11
7. "Sneaking Out" – 1:12
8. "Don't Touch That Switch!" – 0:26
9. "The Bunny Trick" – 2:41
10. "Get Big Bunny" – 4:11
11. "Clear the Streets!" – 3:00
12. "Car Flight" – 4:38
13. "Ice Cream!" – 3:47
14. "Look at That Mother!" – 2:26
15. "That's All, Folks!" – 4:20

Home media

Honey, I Blew Up the Kid was first released on VHS and Laserdisc on January 6, 1993. The film was released on a bare-bones DVD in 2002. While the VHS release contained no bonus material besides a music video, the laserdisc release contains the 1992 animated short film, Off His Rockers directed by Barry Cook, which accompanied the theatrical release. To date, Off His Rockers has only appeared on the laserdisc release of this film, making its availability rare, although the short can be viewed on YouTube.

The film was released on VHS in 1997, alongside its predecessor to coincide with the release of the third film in the series, Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves.