Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was released to theaters today in 1989… the only movie brave enough to take on Batman on opening day!
Yes, that time Re-Animator’s Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna wrote a Disney film.
After all, being small can be pretty terrifying.
No, not metaphorically small, just physically small. And adults forget what that’s like. When the world towered over you, and every trip home from school felt like you were crossing a continent.
For kids in the ‘80s, our neighbourhood was our backyard. It was the space we had to survive in. The walk to class. The walk back. The stop at the corner video store. Everywhere you went, the world felt enormous.
And half the time, we were on our own.
We didn’t have the language then, but a lot of us were latchkey kids – at the time it just meant you had a house key on a string and strict instructions not to answer the door. You got home, made a peanut butter sandwich, and waited out the gap between G.I. Joe and the six o’clock news.
So, when I rewatched Honey, I Shrunk the Kids with my son recently, I was moved by how much it still struck a chord. Because that movie isn’t just about being made smaller, it’s about being overlooked. Diminished. Not being noticed until something goes wrong. It takes a catastrophe to make the adults look down.
That long dangerous trek through the backyard wasn’t fantasy, that was every lunchtime walk home, racing to catch the last 20 minutes of The Price Is Right.
And yeah, it had laughs, gadgets, giant cereal bowls. But underneath it all, it felt eerily familiar.
Spending as much time as we did outdoors – getting lost, rolling through rough terrain without helmets, avoiding roving bands of mean kids – the movie covered some very familiar ground. From the first few scenes, it’s clear these kids were trained in the latchkey arts. They were raised on survival.
Because staying alive while your parents were working, distracted, or just too busy, well, that was the start of a typical day. Being a centimetre tall was just a slightly bigger challenge. These kids survived without help, they protected each other… They kept moving. They made it back.
We all did.
But not because anyone came to rescue them. Because they had to.
There’s a bit of wish fulfilment in Wayne Szalinski hovering over the lawn, peering down at every blade of grass, desperate to find his kids. It’s the kind of thing we hoped for. That if we really got in over our heads, our parents – huge and godlike – would stop everything and come looking.
And maybe they would have.
But I think most of us knew better than to wait around. -Pop