By Kayla DeKraker
HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS actors Thomas Brown, Amy O’Neil and Jared Rushton revisited a very special set piece from the classic ’80s film: the head of the giant animatronic ant.
The prop, now only a shell of what it used to be, stunned the castmates and brought back sentimental moments.
“He’s seen better days,” Dan Lanigan, CEO of Cinema Relics, laughed as they walked up to the object.
“Oh my …!” Brown exclaimed.
“I didn’t find it. It was recovered by the Disney archive,” Lanigan explained. “There’s a lot of damage that’s happened over the years. This is all that’s left.”
He continued, “It’s an important piece. It’s a sign of how they did things in the ’80s, and now something like this would have been done with the giant green blob and CGI it over the top of it.”
Rushton said, “He was so realistic then. It is kind of weird seeing the bones of it.”
Brown added, “The thing was massive, I mean, it was pretty good size it was size…basically a size of a horse or a moose.”
O’Neil talked about how, in the film, Rushton’s character had a deep connection with the ant.
“It was a big turning point for his character, just showing the humanity of like kid,” she said.
“It was a good-natured, sincere film, so it’s something that I’m happy to be associated with. I think we all are,” Rushton concluded.
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Peter Zamora, who assisted with the larger than life-sized ant on set, previously spoke about how it worked.
“The [puppet] ant’s being run mostly by cable,” he explained. “Other than that, we have the mouthpiece…which is remote control. The eyes themselves move by remote control, and the legs work with puppets as marionettes. So it takes somewhere between 7-12 people to make the ant run. But whatever arm movements are done by the arm operator can be repeated by the ant…[Antie] can basically do anything.”
HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS released in 1989 and was the first of three films in the franchise, which also included HONEY, I BLEW UP THE KID and HONEY, WE SHRUNK OURSELVES.
Movieguide® reviewed the second film in the series. The review reads, “After inadvertently shrinking his children with a particle beam in 1989, madcap inventor Wayne Szalinski is at it again. This time, Wayne’s baby, Adam, wanders in front of his latest experiment: an enlargement ray. Confronted by his wife, Wayne admits: ‘HONEY, I BLEW UP THE KID.'”
The film was rated +4 by Movieguide® for being a “Heartwarming, extremely pro-family movie.”
It’s wonderful that family movies like HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS keep living on today.
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