Problem Child arrived on home video today in 1991, after a July 27, 1990 theatrical tantrum.
I first rented this when I was probably as far from the target audience as you can get – I was 17, and this felt like the VHS equivalent of watching a kid poke an anthill with a stick – mean-spirited, but also kind of fascinating. In my mind, it was like they wanted the edgy irreverence of Beetlejuice or The Simpsons, aimed it squarely at the Home Alone demographic, but with the emotional warmth of a low-grade fever.
I mean, I thought I got the joke. This was peak Bartmania, with every marketer in America scrambling to bottle some of that mischievous, rebellious energy. But I couldn’t help but assume Problem Child misread the assignment. Instead of a lovable scamp flipping the bird to authority, you get Junior, a redheaded agent of chaos, making life miserable for a wide-eyed Ritter and a pre-Seinfeld Michael Richards playing a serial killer. It was weirdly nihilistic for a PG-rated family film, and the fact that it spawned two sequels and a Saturday morning cartoon was beyond me. I was that teenage fuddy-duddy who thought the mean streak was dialed way past comfortable.
If Home Alone (released later that year) was about a kid outsmarting adults with cartoon violence, Problem Child was about a kid who just wanted to watch the world burn. It’s the kind of thing Millennials (remember when they used to call ’em Gen Y?) absorbed without blinking, just another hyperactive, slightly unhinged video rental that could double as a babysitter.
And that’s how I left it for 35 years – one of those movies I chalked up as a churn-n-burn fad of early ’90s kid cinema. But then I watched it again with my son. And where I used to see a pint-sized nihilist, he saw a little guy sticking it to all the stuffed shirts. He laughed his head off, and somewhere in that moment, I realized exactly where I stood in the hierarchy. It took over three decades, but I finally got the joke. It was on me. -Pop