I made Honey, I Shrunk the Kids as a favor to my good friend Walt Disney. Walt had hired those knuckleheads at ACME Landscaping to build him a giant golf course in his back yard. Boners that they are, they gave him a yard’s worth of gigantic plastic blades of grass and promptly shot themselves in the head to ensure Walt was stuck holding the joke. But Walt NEVER gets stuck holding the joke, so he asked me to make a film about some dumb wiener who shrinks his kids and throws them in the backyard. Once the film was successful, Walt built a theme ride out of all that ACME grass and made huge profits. This, everyone, is why John Lasseter can suck Walt Disney’s dick.
When directors need a nerd, who do they hire now that Rick Moranis has passed away? Have we retired the nerd archetype in honor of his genius? Perhaps we have. Those of us lucky enough to work with him know there can be no replacement. He was the best. He will be missed.
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is concerned with two families: Nerd Family and Jock Family. Nerd Family has Rick Moranis as Dr. Nerd and a clone of Rick Moranis as his son, Professor Jr. His wife is about to divorce him and his daughter is trying to cover up the fact that she’s half-nerd by talking about the mall at least twice per sentence.
Next door, the Jock Family have their own struggles. The dad, played by Jim Carrey’s less successful older brother Matt Frewer, is preparing to embark on a “sportsing out!” weekend at the lake. His oldest son, however, is not as pumped up as everyone else. Turns out, he just got kicked off the football team for his frowning eyeballs and “suspicions of gayitude”. Older brother just doesn’t have the sporting life in him. Younger brother, however, is the sportiest kid on Earth. Dad is not interested in him though because he’s so annoyingly eager. In fact, the dad’s pretty sure kid #2 belongs to the mailman.
Dr. Nerd is working an a vengeance-based piece of equipment. It’s a penis shaped ray gun that shrinks things. He intends to use it on all those Asian businessmen who laughed at him last time he went to the gym. Long story short, it shrinks his kids. Sport kid #2 comes over to steal their Nintendo and Use Your Illusion cassettes, and he gets shrunk too. His sad, maybesexual older brother comes looking for him (he nabs some of older sister’s Teen Beat magazines as kind of an asshole tax) and gets shrunk as well.
The four kids are now so small that everything in our regular-sized world becomes really gigantic and plastic. Before they can figure out what to do, Dr. Nerd sweeps them up and throws them in a garbage bag. Once the bag is outside, the kids break out and experience the gigantic back yard! All except for sport kid #2, who could not hold his breath long enough to not suffocate. Instead of burying him, they just shove him down an ant-hole, which is like a plastic volcano to them.
From this point on, the movie is a series of normally really small things made giant, dangerous, and plastic. It’s kind of like a video game. In Stage One they fight a bee. In Stage Two they try to avoid raindrops. Stage Three is the lawn mower stage. And Stage Four is sort of a bonus stage where they speed around collecting coins after digesting a giant grain of cocaine.
Eventually they get back to Dr. Nerd’s workshop and tell him through a megaphone that his penis shrinker ray fucked up. “Okay,” he says so loud that Professor Jr.’s head vibrates off. “But it will take me a long time to invent a growraygun!”
It takes three years. In that time, pseudo cool daughter and gay heart-throb older brother have nothing to do but sex. Of course, this makes her pregnant. Nine months later, she dies during childbirth. Older brother becomes a single father and dies of what a hero that makes him.
When Dr. Nerd finally completes his growraygun, everyone is dead except for his grandson. Due to weird movie logic, the growraygun makes the kid who was born miniature grow giant rather than grow regular. Now there’s a giant baby on the loose!
Dr. Nerd cannot take care of this giant baby by himself, so he must tell Sports Dad what happened to his kids and that he’s grandpa to a giant baby. The two put aside their nerd/jock differences and move in together, changing giant diapers, preparing giant bottles, and occasionally blowing each other.
We jump ahead twelve years. The baby is now a normal sized teenager played by Staci Keanan. One day while cleaning the entire house all by herself because both her parents are fucking slobs, she finds the shrinkraygun and accidentally shrinks everyone. They are eaten by a cat, then thrown up by a cat. The same cat. I believe she was a calico. Her name was Honey.