Honey, I Shrunk the Kids/Headscratchers

• Bearing in mind that pretty much the whole movie runs on bullshit science, there's one moment that particularly bugs me, to wit: Assume that the machine works by sucking empty space out of a given object but leaving its mass unchanged, as Wayne says. If you were to shrink, say, a 150-pound person down to the size of a gnat, wouldn't you end up with a gnat-sized person who still weighs 150 pounds? Could someone that small yet that massive even move? It can't be that Wayne was just dumbing it down for the people in his audience, either, because they're all scientists just like him.
  • And thinking in reverse, who would want to eat the turkey that has been increased in size? It would be less meat per bite!
  • Well, they should still be able to move because their strength wouldn't change any more than their mass. The real problem is the pressure applied to the ground due to the decreased surface area of their feet. 150 pounds applied to, for example, a nail, might well be enough to drive it through the floorboards. The kids' feet aren't any wider than the tip of a nail.
  • Just to clarify, your headscratcher basically boils down to "Bearing in mind that pretty much the whole movie runs on bullshit science, why the heck is the science bullshit?"
• In that same scene, Wayne says, "When Einstein invented the atomic bomb, did they ask him to prove that it worked?" Instead of saying, "You, Mr. Szalinski, are hardly Einstein," the guy should have said, "No, because Oppenheimer invented the atomic bomb, numbnuts."
  • And oddly enough, Einstein only proved that the concept could work, but didn't invent it. He's got it all flipped.
  • Plus, I'm pretty sure they were required to prove that it worked. That was the whole point of the test fire in New Mexico, wasn't it?
• The kids never seem to notice Mr. Szalinski's antics in searching for them. If you were walking through a 3-mile long stretch of forest, I daresay a 1200 foot tall giant repeatedly spinning over the forest would stick out like a sore thumb. Yet they take no notice of their frantically-searching, giant parents until they are at the back door.
  • I think you're forgetting just how small the kids were at the time. They weren't action-figure sized, they were smaller than ants. So small that most of the time they couldn't even see the sun over their heads because the grass was so thick. And the parents couldn't be everywhere in the yard at once. It's completely plausible that the kids managed to just miss them every time. The real question is why the kids didn't hear the parents talking. There's no reason I can think of why a shrunken person would have a hard time hearing a non-shrunken person talking.
    • Other scenes show that full-sized people talking is extremely loud to the shrinkydinks. While this may seem like it would make their voices even easier to pick up, it might also have rendered it like distant thunder, considering they were hovering several inches at least from the lawn as well. "Nick!" might be heard just as nnnk.
    • The human ear only picks up a particular range of sound frequencies. Compacting the molecules in the ear would probably alter the manner in which sound is perceived, and enough of a change could render normal speech imperceptible by shifting it out of range completely.
• A full trip across the backyard and they only come across one ant and one scorpion?
  • The fact that they came across a scorpion at all is pretty remarkable. How many scorpions do you have nesting in your backyard? As for the ants, I'd chalk that up to pest control. The ant the kids found might have been the one ant to escape the exterminator.
  • There are other insects than ants and scorpions in gardens. Lots of other insects. Take a piece of garden half a metre in diameter, and you'll find it teeming with all sorts of insects. Most are too tiny for us to see if not specifically looking for them, but for the shrunken kids they'd be the size of dogs. It's completely implausible that they only see the two insects in the garden.
  • We just see the plot-relevant insects, is all. There are a couple of others (the bee they ride, the dead fly early on), but obviously they didn't want to spend a lot of money on expensive special effects for things that would only set the tone, not actually forward the plot. If it were made now I'm sure the place would be teeming with huge CG bugs, but back then they actually had to build animatronics and props for them.
• Mr. Szalinski's yard was supposedly overgrown, but the lawnmower certainly doesn't seem to be making much of a difference.
  • Remote control mower had a variable setting blade height that Nick's buddy didn't know how to set.
• Why does Sterling Labs have trouble enlarging things in Honey, I Blew Up the Kid? The shrinking machine could enlarge things just fine in the end of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
  • Either they built an inferior machine or you have to tune it just right to enlarge something without making it explode. Wayne managed to enlarge a turkey at the end of the first movie, so it's clear he knows how to do it.
• I love this series dearly, but the main IJBM for me has always just been that after the first film, Wayne Szalinski should have won the Nobel Prizes for both Physics(the machine itself) and Peace(solving the world's problems with garbage, space shuttle cargo weight, actually ALL industrial cargo weight, possibly WORLD HUNGER if the enlarged food can do more than just double in size and actually provides proportionately large amounts of calories and nutrition, heck, even prison overcrowding if the government sanctioned its use on inmates for the length of their terms) and instantly become one of the richest people in the world and most famous scientists of all time. The sequels make it clear they've gotten substantially more money and moved to progressively bigger houses, and Wayne is the President of Szalinski Labs by the third film, but he's still seen as something of a joke overall. Obviously the Anthropic Principle applies though, and the third film even appears to Lampshade this by having Wayne pleasantly surprised to see his R&D department have developed a working dog translator, which he remarks "Wow! Could be promising!".
  • There's a trope for that, but it's for supervillians.
  • Wayne is smart, but he's not all that bright. It's possible he did achieve some fame after he showed off his working shrink ray to the scientific community but later on he squandered it somehow. Also, he may be company president in name only. Despite his scientific knowledge he's still something of a bumbling dunce. His board of directors may have quietly shuffled him off to the side and elected someone else to run Szalinski Labs for him, only trotting Wayne out for press photos and such.
    • I'm pretty sure that even if I were a complete goober who somehow managed to cure cancer, I'd be the the richest and most famous goober in the world.
  • Inmates, hell - everyone would want to be shrunk. Imagine the benefits - your average house could hold thousands and thousands of people. Sure, climate might be a bit of a problem when a raindrop could drown you and a gust of wind could blow you away tornado-style, but the possibilities would be endless regardless - people could build virtually sealed, box-sized weather-resistant super-villas, and only re-enlarge themselves when going out. And imagine the benefits in manufacturing - nanomachines, anyone?
  • On a similar subject, where in the hell was Szalinski's patent attorney when he signed on the dotted line with Sterling Labs? What kind of raw deal did he get himself into that allowed them to throw him off his own project?
• The kids' sizes are portrayed inconsistently. At one point Nick calculates that they're 1/4 inch tall. However, they can all fit comfortably on the back of an ant. That must be a HUGE ant (even though Nick calls it a baby... which also doesn't make sense because baby ants are larvae). Especially since it can fight a scorpion. Later on, Nick is apparently small enough to use a Cheerio as a flotation device.
  • Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale. It's a common problem for movies like this. Apparently "We're now tiny" = "Everything else is huge enough to ride on!".
  • Or, you know, Nick was wrong. Just because a character says something doesn't mean it's the exact truth.

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