Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (1992)

Honey, I Blew Up the Kid arrives as the second installment in a franchise about an inventor whose machines cannot behave. This 1992 Disney comedy sends a two-year-old named Adam through a growth ray, then watches him become seven feet, fourteen feet, fifty feet, and finally a Las Vegas attraction. The film is a one-joke contraption, and the joke is scale. It is also, for our purposes, a remarkably quiet specimen. The cast is almost entirely white and suburban. Ron Canada and Gregory Sierra appear in minor supporting roles, a marshal and a board member, but the film never comments on their presence or builds any multicultural thesis around them. There is no LGBTQ material, no racial consciousness, no climate anxiety, no neurodivergent character, no body-positive arc. Adam's gigantism is slapstick spectacle, not a parable of self-acceptance. The story is contemporary fantasy, so revisionist history has nothing to chew on.

The feminist content is modest. Diane Szalinski is capable, and she is the one who realizes Adam will calm down if she is enlarged to his scale. She comforts her son and later punches the corporate villain for hurting him. This is standard competent-mother characterization, not a feminist argument. The anti-capitalist gesture is equally mild. Dr. Hendrickson is an avaricious colleague who wants control of Wayne's invention, but the company chairman simply fires him. Corporate power is corrected by a nicer executive. The film offers no systemic critique of capital, only a reminder that some coworkers are unpleasant.

Lecture energy is absent. The screenplay never stops for a sermon about society, identity, or the environment. It wants pratfalls, miniature furniture, a giant bunny, and a toddler wandering through Fremont Street. The result is culturally inert, harmless, and mildly diverting. It carries a faint trace of capable-mother energy and a faint trace of anti-corporate annoyance, but these are not modern social consciousness. They are old Hollywood defaults. The sommelier sets down the glass. Thin, inoffensive, and almost entirely without the vintage we are cataloging.