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Honey, I Shrunk the Kids

Borrowing two good end elements from two 1950s sci-fi pics, The Incredible Shrinking Man and Them!, scripters pit two sets of unfriendly neighbor kids, mistakenly shrunk to only 1/4-inch high, against what ordinarily would be benign backyard fixtures, both alive and inanimate.

Borrowing two good end elements from two 1950s sci-fi pics, The Incredible Shrinking Man and Them!, scripters pit two sets of unfriendly neighbor kids, mistakenly shrunk to only 1/4-inch high, against what ordinarily would be benign backyard fixtures, both alive and inanimate.

Their misfortune was to get caught in the beam of ne’er-do-well inventor Wayne Szalinski’s (Rick Moranis) molecule-reducing contraption while he’s out giving a lecture to a group of skeptical scientists.

He sweeps them into the dustplan along with the other flotsam that goes out with the trash.

Now, they must make it back to the house among towering vegetation, homungous bugs and fierce water showers on a quest that would be nightmarish except that it seems mostly like a lot of fun.

Pic [story by Stuart Gordon, Brian Yuzna and ed Naha] is in the best tradition of Disney and even better than that because it is not so juvenile that adults won’t be thoroughly entertained.

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids

  • Production: Walt Disney. Dir Joe Johnston; Producer Penney Finkelman Cox; Screenplay; Editor Naha, Tom Schalman; Camera Hiro Narita; Editor Michael A. Stevenson; Music James Horner Art Dir Gregg Fonseca
  • Crew: (Color) Available on VHS, DVD. Extract of a review from 1989. Running time: 86 MIN.
  • With: Rick Moranis Matt Frewer Marcia Strassman Kristine Sutherland Thomas Brown Jared Rushton