Hello everyone! 🙂
Welcome to ‘Bradley’s Basement’ and I’m Tim Bradley!
I’ve seen the sequel to the 1989 film ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’ on Disney+! This is the 1992 film ‘Honey, I Blew Up the Kid’. I wouldn’t say it was as good as the first film, but I found some entertaining value in it and it was very intriguing how a follow-up was made to the classic 1989 film.
‘Honey, I Blew Up the Kid’ (And no that doesn’t mean a kid got blown-up. It means he became giant-sized instead of miniaturised) focuses on the Szalinski family with their latest addition– a two-year old called Adam. He’s accidentally exposed to an industrial-sized growth machine built by his father.
It causes him to gradually grow to giant-size. The antagonist of the film happens to be Rick Moranis as Wayne’s co-worker Dr. Charles Hendrickson (played by John Shea), who wants the giant baby Adam to be stopped at all costs and wants to take over Wayne’s invention owned by their company.
It’s nice that Rick Moranis came back to play the father/inventor character from the first film. There’s also Marcia Strassman back as Diane, Wayne’s wife and Robert Oliveri as Nick, Wayne’s son. It was pretty surreal to see Nick a lot older compared to when he was a little kid from the first film. 🙂
Incidentally, this was the first time I saw ‘Honey, I Blew Up the Kid’ on Disney+ compared to seeing ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’ first time on DVD back in the 2000s. The film also features Amy O’Neill as Amy Szalinski, Wayne and Diane’s daughter, though she’s only in the film for like the first few opening scenes.
I’m disappointed the next-door neighbours from the first film – the Thompsons – including Big Russ, Mae, Little Russ and Ron didn’t return for this second film. It would have been nice to have seen the romance between Amy and Little Russ develop from that film. I wonder whatever became of that. 😐
Adam Szalinski is played by two boys – Daniel and Joshua Shalikar. It was amusing to see Adam gradually growing to giant-sized when his parents and his brother tried to calm him down and tame him. I do think that some of the special effects for Adam being giant-sized are maybe dated lately. 😦
As well as John Shea as Charles Hendrickson, there’s also Lloyd Bridges as Clifford Sterling, the president of Sterling Labs, who supports Wayne’s endeavours to restoring his two-year-old Adam back to normal size. There’s also Keri Russell as Mandy Park, who becomes Nick’s love interest here.
Hmm! Keri Russell seems to be a familiar name. I wonder if she went on to be in ‘Mission: Impossible III’ and ‘Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker’. 😀 It was amusing how Nick and Mandy were in Adam’s giant-sized pockets and how they were in a taxi cab and miniaturised by the film’s finish. 🙂
There’s also Ron Canada as U.S. Marshall Preston Brooks, Michael Milhoan as Captain Ed Myerson, Gregory Sierra as Terence Wheeler and Leslie Neale as Constance Winters. There’s also Linda Carlson and Julia Sweeney (who was in ‘Beethoven’s 3rd’ and ‘Beethoven’s 4th’) as the nosey neighbours. 😀
Sadly the film isn’t directed by Joe Johnston like with the first film. Instead, the film is directed by Randal Kleiser, who is well-known for directing the 1978 film ‘Grease’. The film’s music is also different. Instead of James Horner providing it, the film’s music is provided by Bruce Broughton here.
‘Honey, I Blew Up the Kid’ has been an enjoyable and fascinating sequel to watch. I wouldn’t say it was great, but it was decent enough. I know a third film was made after this called ‘Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves’. Will I see that film before the upcoming film ‘Shrunk’ comes along? Who knows?
It was also good to see Quark the dog again in ‘Honey I Blew Up the Kid’! 😀
Thanks for reading!
Bye for now!
Tim 🙂
Bradley's Basement 