Summer of '89: Odds and Ends

The movies we missed this summer.

Summer is coming to an end and so is our Summer of '89 pop culture retrospective series. All summer long, week-by-week, we've followed the films and television programs from one of our most enduring cultural summers.

Well, we did skip a few movies and, as promised, we're catching up with them all in this final issue. Thanks for reading and watching along, patiently waiting for your favorite movies, and, of course, for being a paid subscriber of Feature Presentation. You keep the lights on and make crazy projects like this possible.

Stay tuned for what's in store next for you, our generous paid subscribers.

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989)

The scientist father of a teenage girl and boy accidentally shrinks his and two other neighborhood teens to the size of insects. Now the teens must fight diminutive dangers as the father searches for them.

June 23, 1989

Rick Moranis, Marcia Strassman, Matt Frewer, Kristine Sutherland, Amy O'Neill
cinematography by Hiro Narita
music by James Horner
screenplay by Ed Naha, Tom Schulman
produced by Penney Finkelman Cox
directed by Joe Johnston

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is a film that feels backward engineered from the idea for a theme park ride. Think about it: make the audience really "small”, scare them with huge housecats and stuff, spray some water on them - the thing Imagineers itself.

And that's exactly what Disney did in 1994, replacing the crowd favorite Captain EO with "Honey, I Shrunk the Audience," a 4D experience that, you guessed it, shakes the audience around in front of a screen, shoots them with some water, and sends them on their merry way, tossing their 3D glasses in the tubs on the way out.

And it's more thrilling than the movie. For starters, it does in 20 minutes what takes the movie a much longer-feeling 90 minutes. Rick Moranis (we should talk about he's our most featured actor this summer, from Ghostbusters II to this to the soon-mentioned Parenthood, he was in hit movie after hit movie all summer) and Marcia Strassman return for the short film hosted by Monty Python's Eric Idle. Rats crawl at your feet, lions roar in your face, and laser beams threaten to zap you.

In 2010, it was replaced with...Captain EO. Yes, to honor the late Michael Jackson, Disney brought the attraction back. A playground inspired by the film remained at Disney World's Hollywood Studios until 2016. A sequel, the fourth film in the franchise, is supposedly in the works but has been for years.

Weekend at Bernie's (1989)

Summer of 1963. Carson is getting married to her boyfriend so her friends Melaina, Pudge and Luanne take her to Myrtle Beach for one last irresponsible weekend.

July 5, 1989

Andrew McCarthy, Jonathan Silverman, Catherine Mary Stewart, Terry Kiser
cinematography by François Protat
music by Andy Summers
screenplay by Robert Klane
produced by Victor Drai
directed by Ted Kotcheff

Weekend at Bernie's is one of those movies that played on cable a zillion times, so it never really left the public consciousness. It was plenty popular in '89, grossing twice its budget and earning a sequel in 1993, but it wasn't a phenomenon by any means. Critics and audiences alike gave it a collective meh (it currently holds a 54% Critics Score and a 57% Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes) and all these years later, I'm not sure many people would be it in their Top 5 or Top 10 comedies of the year.

But everyone knows Weekend at Bernie's.

That's because the puppeteering of Bernie's dead body has become its own stand-alone joke. In the same way that Shakespeare created the sayings "too much of a good thing" or "the clothes make the man, Weekend at Bernie's gave us the phrase Weekend at Bernie's, which Urban Dictionary defines as "the act of propping up a friend who's passed out and can't stand on his or her own." College kids around the country make this joke without having ever seen the movie.

The film has been referenced on Beavis and Butt-head, Rick and Morty, and The Eric Andre Show. The dance move Movin' Like Bernie, which involves a leaned-back shoulder shimmy, became a meme ten years ago and was adopted by sports teams in their celebration, from the 2010 Baltimore Ravens to the 2012 Oakland Athletics. And, unfortunate as it is, I've seen more than a few Weekend at Bernie's jokes on Elon's Twitter during this political season...

Turner & Hooch (1989)

Detective Scott Turner has three days left in the local police department before he moves to a bigger city to get some 'real' cases—not just misdemeanors. When Amos Reed is murdered, Scott sets himself on the case, but the closest thing to a witness to the murder is Reed's dog, Hooch, which Scott has to take care of—to avoid Hooch being 'put to sleep'.

July 28, 1989

Tom Hanks, Beasley the Dog, Mare Winningham, Craig T. Nelson, Reginald VelJohnson
cinematography by Adam Greenberg
music by Charles Gross
screenplay by Dennis Shryack, Michael Blodgett, Daniel Petrie, Jr., Jim Cash, Jack Epps Jr.
produced by Raymond Wagner
directed by Roger Spottiswoode

For the next few movies, three different comedies, we're going to take a look at their television adaptations.

Turner & Hooch, the Roger Spottiswoode-directed comedy starring police partners Tom Hanks and a French Mastiff, was adapted into a sitcom in 2021 starring Josh Peck and five French Mastiffs pretending to be one French Mastiff. The show premiered on Disney+ and only earned one season before it was canceled. But at least you can still go watch it on Disney+, right?

Wrong! In 2023, the powers that be at Disney purged more than 50 tv shows and movies from the site in a cost-cutting measure and now they're all just...gone. I wrote about this when it happened in my obituary for the show Big Shot. Here's what I wrote at the time and although it was written for that show, all of the same ideas apply:

Disney, in all their infinite wisdom, is essentially deleting the show at the end of the month in a purge that will see many of their originals, from Willow to The World According to Jeff Goldblum to The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, taken out with the garbage. They are not the only streamer to rethink their own library, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but with no DVD/Blu-Ray releases of these titles, they’re just…gone forever. There will be no legal way to watch them.

That’s upsetting for a million different reasons, content revisionism chief among them. All that hard work from the casts and production crews, all deleted as you delete an old grocery list from your Notes app. John Stamos, star and producer of the show, tweeted, “I call BS” after Willow writer John Bickerstaff said, “They gave us six months (on the platform). Not even. This business has become absolutely cruel.”

Those who sail the sevens seas may still yet discover this buried treasure, but as the Writer’s Guild of America fights for fair wages from streaming residuals, this move is a slap in the face from the mighty hand of Disney, the world’s largest media conglomerate.

Parenthood (1989)

The story of the Buckman family and friends, attempting to bring up their children. They suffer/enjoy all the events that occur: estranged relatives, the 'black sheep' of the family, the eccentrics, the skeletons in the closet, and the rebellious teenagers.

August 2, 1989

Steve Martin, Jason Robards, Mary Steenburgen, Dianne Wiest, Rick Moranis
cinematography by Donald McAlpine
music by Randy Newman
screenplay by Lowell Ganz, Babaloo Mandel
produced by Brian Grazer
directed by Ryan Howard

Ron Howard's Parenthood earned two television adaptations, one 12-episode flop and one hit series.

In 1990, one year and eighteen days after the film hit theaters, the sitcom version of Parenthood premiered on NBC. Executive produced by Howard and with half of the show's episodes directed by Allan Arkush, it was a pretty direct adaptation of the movie, retaining character names and situations. Ed Begley Jr. took over for Steve Martin (great casting), Jayne Atkinson took over for Mary Steenburgen (that works), and David Arquette took over for Keanu Reeves (sure). It premiered with a handful of other 1989 movie-to-tv adaptations, including Baby Talk (the sitcom version of Look Who's Talking) and Uncle Buck (more on that in a minute). Although the show received strong reviews, it never really caught on.

2010 saw Howard and producing partner Brian Grazer join Friday Night Lights showrunner Jason Katims to create the dramedy version of Parenthood, starring a who's who of network television actors: Peter Krause, Lauren Graham, Craig T. Nelson, Dax Shepard, Monica Potter, Erika Christensen, Mae Whitman, and many others. Just like the film's 124-minute runtime, you won't believe the amount of drama they cram into 43 minutes of television. Over the course of its six seasons, it racked up a handful of Emmy, Critics' Choice, and Golden Globe nominations because that's what happens to shows that do a lot of shit in every episode. Although it went off the air in January of 2015, it wasn't missing for long - This Is Us basically replaced it in September 2016.