We're Back: A Dinosaur's Story

Dick Zondag, Ralph Zondag, Phil Nibbelink, and Simon Wells, 1993
Rotten Tomatoes score: 33%

Roll back the rock to the dawn of time.

This movie came out in 1993, which might first make you suspect Steven Spielberg's Amblimation studio wanted to cash in on the Jurassic Park craze. I was going to make a comment to that effect, but then I read the Wikipedia article, which contains an in-depth (albeit unsourced) discussion of the movie's production. Apparently it was conceived in 1989, four years before Jurassic Park came out. It just goes to show how you shouldn't assume these things—it wasn't cashing in on Jurassic Park at all; it was cashing in on The Land Before Time.

But 1993 was also the middle of the Disney animation renaissance, when animated movies featuring celebrity voices were all the rage. So Amblimation dutifully signed up every available celebrity in sight, including such puzzling choices as Julia Child and Walter Cronkite. Wikipedia contains another (unsourced) report about how John Malkovich was signed to play the villain but left due to creative differences. On the plus side, we do get the incomparable John Goodman as a Tyrannosaurus rex.

Rex, as he calls himself, appears in a pointlessly tacked-on prologue, in which he begins to regale a small bluebird with his life story. Sixty-five million years ago, Rex was a savage beast roaming the earth, until one day he met a little Great-Gazoo-looking alien (voice of Jay Leno). Jay brings Rex aboard his spacecraft and feeds him a mouthful of "Brain Grain," a breakfast cereal that turns wild animals into talking cartoon animals. It turns out Mr. Leno works for Captain Neweyes (voice of Walter Cronkite), a wise and benevolent entrepreneur from the far future. Having struck it rich selling his magical cereal, Neweyes has decided to build a time machine and a "wish radio" to serve mankind.

And what does Captain Neweyes do with his ability to read the wishes of the world's children? Does he use his futuristic technology to travel through the centuries rescuing billions from famine and violent death? Well, maybe that's next on his to-do list, but for now he's dealing with the great humanitarian project of bringing a bunch of talking dinosaurs to the children of the 1990s. Arriving in Manhattan on Thanksgiving Day 1993, Rex and his dino-buddies meet an artful dodger named Louie (voice of someone called Joey Shea) and a neglected rich girl named Cecilia (voice of Lisa Simpson). The dinosaurs make their debut in the Macy's Parade, performing an obligatory musical number and causing minor havoc.

Louie and Cecilia decide to run away and join the circus, but unfortunately the circus is run by Captain Neweyes' inexplicably evil brother Professor Screweyes (voice of not John Malkovich). The professor does not really seem to have an academic appointment, but he does really have a screw for an eye, which gives him mind-control powers. (A screw? Apart from making his name rhyme with his brother's, is there any reason why his eye is a screw?) Screweyes started his "eccentric circus" to frighten children, and he has a "fright radio" to help him. After ordering Louie and Cecilia to get lost, he then abruptly changes his mind, forces them to sign a contract in blood, and—wow, this lighthearted children's movie has taken a dark turn. Screweyes doesn't really want the children in his circus; he's just using them as leverage to get the dinosaurs on board.

Screweyes has a bottle of alka-seltzers that turn the dinosaurs back into mindless brutes, and now that he has his real stars, he releases the children from their contract. The kids are looked after by Stubbs the clown (voice of Martin Short), who reluctantly tells them what has become of Rex and the gang. Screweyes astounds his audience with the ferocious beasts, but Rex breaks free of his mind control and attacks Screweyes. It's up to Louie and Cecilia to use the Power of Friendship to transform the dinosaurs back to their jolly cartoon selves. For some reason this works, and Professor Screweyes, left alone with his fears, gets attacked by a flock of crows and vanishes, leaving only his screw eye behind. It's way, way more disturbing than it needs to be, and I have no idea what they were thinking.

(Here's a link to the scene. You don't have to watch the rest of the movie. I assure you it is totally out of place.)

Perhaps because this was such an inauspicious note to go out on, we now learn that the dinosaurs have gone to the museum of natural history, where curator Dr. Bleeb (voice of Julia Child) has expected them. The dinosaurs will pose as statues and only reveal their true nature to children, which certainly raises a lot of questions, but let's just leave it at that.

I'm at a loss as to how I should call this one. The story is a jumbled mess (probably a result of trying to stretch a 32-page picture book into a feature film), but the animation isn't bad, and the musical score is excellent. One last virtue that's worth mentioning is the mercifully short run time of 73 minutes; I wish more movies would embrace the less-is-more philosophy.

Okay, I've made my decision:

Richie Rich

Donald Petrie, 1994
Rotten Tomatoes score: 25%

This is the story of a little boy who possessed enormous wealth and worldwide renown, who had things that other children could only dream of, but whose fortune and fame prevented him from having a normal childhood. Then, when he was 14 years old, he starred in the movie Richie Rich.

Macaulay Culkin was without a doubt the biggest child star of the 90s, but by 1994 he was no longer the junior hit-maker he had been in his Home Alone days. In that year, he appeared in Getting Even with Dad, The Pagemaster, and this. For his efforts, he was nominated for the Golden Raspberry Award.

Now, I've never seen Getting Even with Dad, but it looks awful; and as for The Pagemaster, the less said the better. But I am at a loss to explain the antipathy toward this Harvey Comics adaptation. Granted, I as a nine-year-old boy was exactly the target audience. And looking back on it 20 years later, I can't help comparing it to Richie Rich's Christmas Wish, a comparison that would make Howard the Duck look like Citizen Kane.

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Richie Rich is the richest boy in the world. According to one of the alternate posters, he has 17 billion dollars, but I'm not sure how they figured that. (In the movie, Richie's father is said to be worth $70 billion, so maybe whoever wrote the poster just misheard the dialogue.) But numbers aren't important—suffice it to say that Richie is cartoon-rich. He lives in a stately mansion (actually the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, N.C.); he is waited on by an English valet (Jonathan Hyde) who wears a wingtip collar and waistcoat to exercise; there's a McDonald's franchise in his house and a family portrait carved into the face of a mountain out back; and his father employs an in-house science team that cranks out a steady stream of impossible inventions, for no apparent business purpose.

But all is not well. For one thing, Richie's life of privilege is also one of responsibility, and he is so busy he has no time to be a kid. A perhaps even more serious problem is that the Rich Enterprises CFO, Laurence Van Dough (John Larroquette), is planning to murder the entire Rich family and take over their company. (Do you ever wonder what went wrong in your childhood that deprived you of the opportunity to outwit lamebrain criminals?) His plan nearly succeeds, as he plants a bomb in Dad's private plane just before the family flies off to meet the Queen. But at the last minute, Richie decides to stay behind and hang out with normal kids; meanwhile, Mom and Dad manage to escape the deadly explosion and strike out in a life raft.

Van Dough's efforts to loot the company are stymied by Richie, who asserts his rights and runs the company in his parents' stead. (Richie tells Van Dough that his father has never fired anyone, which is hard to believe, but what do I know about business?) Meanwhile, Van Dough frames Richie's trusted friend and valet Cadbury for the murders, so it's up to Richie and his normal-kid friends to bust him out and take down the real bad guys. Fortunately for the ragtag band of kids, they have super-scientist Keenbean (Mike McShane) on their side, providing them with a robot bee and a corrosive so powerful it eats through everything except the tube it's kept in.

Conveniently, Van Dough's evil plan has shifted from killing Mom and Dad Rich to kidnapping them. The in-story explanation is that Van Dough needs them to open the Rich family vault, but it also has the salutary effect of sparing us an additional act where Richie rescues the parents. The final boss fight against Van Dough takes place on the face of Mount Richmore, which allows for some high-spirited action scenes. (It reminds me of the finale of North by Northwest, but I don't know how intentional that was.) Anyway, they defeat Van Dough, proving once again that fabulous wealth can triumph over villainy.

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The Meteor Man

Robert Townsend, 1993
Rotten Tomatoes score: 29%

In my Disney Channel honorable mentions page, I began my review of Up, Up, and Away thusly:

Hollywood continues its systematic campaign to neglect the genius of Robert Townsend with this desperately underrated superhero movie.

It didn't occur to me when I wrote that sentence that it would apply with equal force to The Meteor Man, one of the highlights of my eighth year of life. My friends and I used to invent millions of superheroes. We would draw pictures of them, list all their super-powers, and of course, explain how they became superheroes. These explanations typically involved radiation, lightning, "chemicals," or other lethal hazards, and some sort of object or animal to furnish a basis for the requisite super-costume and super-logo.

This was a movie after my own heart, featuring a hero with a laundry list of extraordinary powers, all supplied by what should have been an extremely fatal injury.

Before I describe the plot, I want to acknowledge that Robert Guillaume, Don Cheadle, Marla Gibbs (from The Jeffersons), Ghost Dad, Wallace Shawn ("Inconceivable!"), Chris Tucker (uncredited), Sinbad (the comedian not the sailor), Frank Gorshin (the Riddler from the Adam West Batman), Luther Vandross, Eddie Griffin, and thousands and thousands of other famous actors appeared in this film.

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Jefferson "Jeff" Reed (Robert Townsend) is a substitute teacher at an inner-city elementary school in Washington, D.C. He is kind-hearted and intelligent, but his co-workers and neighbors regard him as a nebbish and a wimp. Jeff's neighborhood has recently been staked out by the Golden Lords, a crack-dealing organization that seems less like a street gang and more like SPECTRE. They bleach their hair blond and wear gold vests and ties, they recruit five-year-old children into their ranks, and their evil leader Simon Caine has a pet tiger.

Jeff would just as soon ignore the Golden Lords and hope they go away, but things change one night when he gets struck by a magic green intergalactic super-meteor from outer space. At first critically injured by the meteor, Jeff miraculously recovers within hours. What's more, he now has a litany of super-powers that would put Clark Kent to shame—in addition to super-strength, hyper-speed, the gift of flight, X-ray vision, heat vision, and freezing breath, Jeff also has psychokinesis, healing powers, rain-making powers, and the ability to talk to dogs.

With some persuading from his neighbors, Jeff agrees to use his powers to rid Washington, D.C., of the Golden Lords once and for all. While he's at it, he brings peace between the Crips and the Bloods, and uses his meteorological talents to grow county-fair-style gigantic produce in the middle of a slum. But Simon's supplier, a drug lord named Mr. Byers, is annoyed at Jeff's interloping and offers two million dollars to any Golden Lord who can bring him the head of the Meteor Man.

But how could the Golden Lords possibly kill Jeff? He has every super-power in the book, and unlike Superman, green space-rocks only make him more powerful. Well, as it happens, Jeff's powers gradually fade away, and when Simon comes a-calling, he has to face him with no more than his new-found courage.

At least, he does until Bill Cosby shows up, playing a drifter who has been carrying around a fragment of the super-meteor in a coffee can. When Jeff and Simon are both exposed to the fragment, a super-duel ensues, and Jeff finally sends the Golden Lords packing—and with the help of the reformed Crips and Bloods, he pulls the plug on the evil Mr. Byers' crack empire.

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I think this is a great movie, but I have to acknowledge its shortcomings, particularly the pervading sense that the story isn't quite finished. I read the novelization of this movie, and I was disappointed (and perplexed) to discover that many crucial scenes had evidently been cut somewhere between the screenplay and the finished product. So, I guess if you really want the whole story, you should read the book. Or read the 6-issue Marvel comic mini-series.

Really, gang, you ought to read more. There are so many movies that have children's books based on them, including eight pages of full-color stills from the movie. Expand your horizons.

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Not Quite Human

Steven Hilliard Stern, 1987
Rotten Tomatoes audience rating: 36%

As this was a TV movie, Rotten Tomatoes gives me only an audience rating. I don't know what kind of grouches gave it such a low rating, but they were clearly never children.

Frankly, I wonder how many people even remember this. I saw it on VHS in the early 90s, then promptly forgot about it for 20 years until someone uploaded it to YouTube. Now anyone can enjoy the antics of Alan Thicke, Bug from Uncle Buck, and Teen Witch, united together in one star-studded blockbuster.

If you ever wondered what the dad from Growing Pains would have been like if he were a genius inventor, but otherwise had exactly the same bland, generic personality, this movie has your answer. His name is Dr. Jonas Carson, and he has finally completed his life's work: Chip, a walking, talking teenage android with perfect artificial intelligence (Jay Underwood). Chip is a cheerful and gregarious robot, but he's not quite human—he is oblivious to subtlety and idiomatic speech. For some reason a lot of androids seem to have that problem in the movies.

Carson's daughter Becky (Robin Lively) thinks her robo-brother is cool, but she is frustrated by his intrusion into her social life. For no conceivable reason, Carson decides that the world must believe that Chip is a real boy, so the family packs up and moves to a new town, where Carson gets a job as a science teacher. Little does he realize, his former employer Vogel (a misanthropic war buff and toy manufacturer who hates the Carsons) wants to kidnap Chip and sell his designs to the Russians, or something.

(All this sounds like the kind of story a 10-year-old kid would make up for a comic book drawn on loose-leaf paper, where every plot element is just whatever first comes to mind. What could a scientist do for a day job? Be a science teacher! Who would want to steal an android? A guy who makes army toys! What reason could they have for keeping the robot a secret? Who cares?)

The storyline about Vogel and his henchman trying to kidnap Chip is put on the back burner while Chip and Becky struggle to get along in their new school. All the other high school characters function purely as plot devices, with few coherent personality traits. Sasha Mitchell from Step by Step plays a dream-hunk who haphazardly vacillates between affection and indifference toward Becky. Chip (programmed to protect humans) rescues a dweeby guy from a bully, but the dweeb immediately turns his back on Chip as soon as the plot calls for an interpersonal conflict. The best-realized secondary character is Erin, a girl who is charmed by Chip's robotic quirkiness and inability to understand slang.

When the crooks finally show up to steal Chip, the plot clumsily switches gears while Becky and Carson try to rescue him. The bad guys need a secret password to reprogram Chip, so they trap Becky and her dad in a junkyard and threaten to activate Chip's self-destruct mechanism unless Carson discloses it. The password turns out to be "CARSON" (I guess "PASSWORD1" was too many characters), but Chip cleverly escapes reprogramming by trapping one of the villains in a box.

But Chip has only moments to act, because the van imprisoning Carson and Becky has been thrown into a car-crusher at the junkyard! Keep in mind, the criminals did not put the van in the crusher; some junkyard employee just so happened to wander along and decide to crush this particular van at this exact moment. Anyway, Chip saves the day, and the family is free to go about their unnecessary ruse of passing off an android as a high school student.

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I was surprised to learn that Not Quite Human was originally a book series by Seth McEvoy. There were six books, all published between 1985 and 1986. I thought only Goosebump books could be speed-written at that rate.

This was followed by two sequels: Not Quite Human II, in which Chip goes to college and meets a female not-quite-human; and Still Not Quite Human, featuring a robotic Alan Thicke. (There's a joke to be made here at Alan Thicke's expense, but I'm going to take the high road. The man wrote the Diff'rent Strokes theme song; let's show some respect.)

Overall, you get no less and no more than you expect from a made-for-TV family comedy. Jay Underwood does an excellent job of portraying what you intuitively expect a teenage robot to act like, and I'm sure today's kids would find him amusing.

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Honey, I Shrunk the Kids

Joe Johnston, 1989
Rotten Tomatoes score: 75%

Wayne Szalinski (Rick Moranis) has just perfected the world's most astonishing invention: A laser beam that destroys apples. Little does anyone expect, all it takes is an errant baseball to convert this industrial marvel into a shrinking ray.

As Szalinski explains to his skeptical corporate benefactors, all atoms are mostly empty space. His device uses magic to reduce that empty space, shrinking objects to minuscule size. Now, you might think that this would increase the density of matter to that of a neutron star, so that a quarter-inch-tall teenager would still weigh over 100 pounds, but that just shows how little you understand about science.

The Szalinskis seem to be having some sort of thinly established family problems due to Wayne's obsessive habits. His wife Diane is fed up with him, and his kids, Amy and Nick, are stuck managing the household on the weekends. Meanwhile, their next-door neighbors, the Thompsons have their own irrelevant problems. Big Russ Thompson can't relate to his elder son, Russ Junior, who has no interest in sports or fly-fishing.

When young Ron Thompson hits a grand-slam through the Szalinskis' attic window, Russ Junior drags him over to apologize to Nick and Amy and to offer to pay for the repairs. Ron insists on retrieving his baseball, so all four kids ascend to the attic just in time to get accidentally zapped by the shrinking ray. Moments later, Wayne Szalinski returns home from a meeting, frustrated by the cool reception his project has received. He expresses his annoyance by aggressively sweeping window fragments (and, unwittingly, the shrunken children) off the attic floor and into a lawn bag. (This scene makes no sense, but it was necessary to put the kids in a garbage bag so as to move them into the yard, where they can encounter more cinematic hazards.)

It takes Szalinski half the movie to realize he has shrunk the kids, whereupon he embarks on a series of spectacularly futile attempts to find them in the yard. He doesn't want to step on them, so he chooses to stumble around the yard on stilts looking at the grass through a magnifying lens. When this fails, he creates a preposterous contraption to suspend him a foot above the ground, using the television as a counterweight.

Meanwhile, the kids have their microscopic hands full. Amy falls into a trickle of water from a sprinkler, and Russ has to use movie first aid to resuscitate her. Nick gets picked up by a bee and has an allergic reaction to pollen, even though the pollen grains are visibly much too large to fit into his nose. They encounter an ant, which immediately kills them all and takes them back to its nest to be fed to larvae. No, actually the ant allows them to ride on its back. Then it protects them from a scorpion, nobly sacrificing its ant life in the process.

(A scorpion? Where is this movie taking place? Why wasn't it a spider?)

Eventually, the writers realized it was taking too long to get the kids into the house, so the Szalinskis' dog Quark arrives as a canis ex machina to carry them indoors. They make it to the breakfast table, where Nick falls into Wayne's bowl of Cheerios, and Wayne notices him in the nick of time. (I saw the trailer for this movie on TV when I was four years old, and this scene scared the bejesus out of me. I was certain that little bastard was going to get eaten.) Anyway, once Wayne discovers the kids, it doesn't take long for him to return them to normal size.

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This was a good kids' movie. We kids loved it at the time, and it still holds up for me. It's funny to see movies from the late 80s and early 90s that still use old-fashioned special effects, realizing that five years later they would be long gone from the movies. They look pretty good, particularly in the ant vs. scorpion sequence.

There were two sequels to this. The first was Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, which deserves the prize for the most misleading title in movie history. (For those not in the know, no child explodes in the movie; he just gets bigger. We were all disappointed.) Later, there was a made-for-TV sequel, Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, where the adults are the shrunken ones. I may get around to these some day.

Oh, one other thing. This movie was filmed in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Vancouver, and Mexico City. Considering that nearly every scene takes place either in the house or on a special-effects sound stage, this multiplicity of locations puzzles me.

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Liar Liar

Tom Shadyac, 1997
Rotten Tomatoes score: 83%

This movie was made to answer a burning question: What if Jim Carrey starred in another movie? Would it make 300 million dollars?

The answer, of course, was yes.

Secondarily, the movie asked another question: What would life be like if you couldn't tell a lie? To answer that question, the movie introduces us to Jim Carrey as Fletcher Reede, a cynical and unethical lawyer who Doesn't Spend Enough Time with His Son. His ex-wife Audrey (Maura Tierney) is at her wits' end with Fletcher's flakiness and dishonesty, and she wants to move away to Boston with her fiancé Jerry (Cary Elwes) and take young Max (not portrayed by Alex D. Linz) along.

On Max's fifth birthday, after Fletcher breaks yet another promise to visit, Max makes a wish that for 24 hours Fletcher will be incapable of lying. Remarkably, the wish comes true, but fortunately Fletcher retains his ability to mug to the camera and say wacky catchphrases. But if Fletcher is forced to speak the truth, how will he go about his job of unscrupulously flouting sundry rules of professional responsibility?

After a series of increasingly zany setbacks, Fletcher discovers a convenient technicality that enables his client to win her case without lying. In the process, he discovers the true meaning of fatherhood, and resolves to stop Audrey and Max from moving to Boston. He exploits the laxity of pre-9/11 airport security to hijack a mobile stairway and drive it down a runway at the takeoff speed of a 737. (Those were the good old days, huh?) This extreme deviant behavior is exactly what was needed to convince Audrey that Fletcher can be a decent father, so she decides to stay in L.A.

This is a great example of a movie that starts with a clever premise and then actually makes it work. The strategy seems to have been to stick Jim Carrey into every situation where a normal person would feel compelled to lie: A one-night stand, a traffic stop, a meeting with your boss, a phone call from your mother, and of course, identifying the color of a pen. These scenes are funny, and the movie wisely avoids doing much else. I shudder to think what might have been if they had made the kid anything other than the plot device he is. Because the jokes work well, the moral character development scenes are easy to swallow. (And the line "I hold myself in contempt" is a very enjoyable play on words.)

Finally, also deserving of mention is the fact that this is one of many movies that has forced poor Cary Elwes to struggle with an American accent. Why couldn't Jerry have been English?

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Mrs. Doubtfire

Chris Columbus, 1993
Rotten Tomatoes score: 71%

With the recent announcement of an upcoming Mrs. Doubtfire sequel, I figured it was time to consider the original. This hilarious romp is the tale of two dangerously unfit parents: A father whose delusions and obsessions drive him to spy on his ex-wife and children in disguise, and a mother so stupid she doesn't realize that the 6-foot-tall sexagenarian nanny in her midst looks and sounds exactly like Robin Williams.

Sally Field plays Miranda Hillard, a mother of three in San Francisco who is fed up with her lout of a husband, Daniel. As the movie begins, Daniel is fired from his job of pointlessly re-dubbing all the dialogue in 1940s-era cartoons. Soon enough, his marriage falls apart too, because Miranda is tired of his unreliability and his habit of throwing goat-themed parties for the kids. Daniel fares poorly in the divorce after the family court correctly perceives his spectacular incompetence as a father (and as a functioning adult in society). Miranda ends up with full custody of the children, unless and until Daniel can get his act together and land a new job.

So Daniel does what anybody would do in his situation—he disguises himself as an elderly Englishwoman named Mrs. Doutfire and takes a job as Miranda's housekeeper. (The sequence where Daniel's brother, Harvey Fierstein, helps him create his cross-dressing persona was totally lost on me as an 8-year-old, but I have grown to appreciate it.) It would be unfair to characterize this disguise as transparent, but Miranda and her kids must be close to Lois Lane levels of obliviousness not to recognize the man they've lived with for years underneath the wig and make-up.

Somehow Daniel manages to find enough time away from his day job to work as a gofer at a local TV station. He performs a manic, paleontologically inaccurate stand-up routine about dinosaurs, which the station owner happens to overhear. Confusing "children" with "your parents in the 70s," Mr. Lundy decides Daniel would be perfect to host a children's TV show, so he arranges a dinner meeting. Meanwhile, Miranda has developed a relationship with James Bond, much to Daniel's chagrin, and they have invited Mrs. Doubtfire to a family dinner at exactly the same restaurant at exactly the same time.

This leads to a Fred Flintstone escapade where Daniel has to repeatedly change back and forth from his hundreds of pounds of Mrs. Doubtfire make-up into the tasteful red real estate agent's blazer he's wearing to impress his boss. He suffers two wardrobe malfunctions: First, he goes to Mr. Lundy's table dressed as Mrs. Doubtfire, and when questioned, he explains that this is the character he will be playing on the children's show. Second, he has to use the Heimlich maneuver to rescue Pierce Brosnan from choking, and in the process loses his mask and wig.

Now that the awful truth is out, Miranda is furious at first. But eventually she realizes that her children are better off if they can spend time with their father now and then, so the two of them come to an arrangement. The movie ends with Mrs. Doubtfire appearing on a Mister Rogers style TV show, giving reassurance to a young letter-writer whose parents are divorced.

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This movie reminds me of two other movies about divorced parents, The Santa Clause and Liar, Liar. All three are great, and all of them had a lot of material that went over my head the first time around. Of the three, the only one where the parents get back together in the end is Liar, Liar. I think that's a cop-out ending, but on the other hand that movie was less sappy than Mrs. Doubtfire. I'm not sure which is better. I guess that one's next.