Before the review, a brief plot summary: Wayne Szalinski is a brilliant and eccentric inventor working for Mr. Jennings at GENTEK. Happily married with a lawyer named Diane for a wife, he has a son, Nick (who follows in the tradition of his father) and a daughter Amy (witty but a bit spoiled). Neighbour to Police Chief Jake McKenna and his family, Wayne is the inventor of the shrink ray, the time hopper, the fully equipped van, and several other wacky creations which, whie functioning almost exactly as they were supposed to, always somehow backfire, sending the family into situations involving crime, aliens and the supernatural.
For one thing, the cast is far better than the movie. Peter Scholari is amazing at Wayne and far better than Rick Moranis, and these actors potray the characters and their relationships far more easily and with more wit. Now potraying Wayne's job and the people at work, this is like a sitcom... only much better.
The titles are always amusing, with examples like "Honey, The House Is Trying To Kill Us", "Honey, We're Past Tense" and "Honey, I'm The Wrong Arm Of The Law", and the one-liners make James Bond blush. "Deader than a Charlie Sheen flick", "When you have a brainstorm, it's a drizzle", and "The mayor will be back in six months, his term was shortened on good behaviour" are some of my favourites. Like Stephen King, When the plots are explained, they sound silly and corny, ie the van is shrunk and falls into Grampa's drink ("Honey, We've Been Swallowed By Grandpa"), a machine sucks them into the Tv ("Honey, We're On TV), and that Wayne inherits a billionaire's brain to re-animate ("Honey, It's A Billion Dollar Brain"). However, also like Stephen King, they are executed well. Unlike "Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves", "Honey, I Blew Up The Kid" and those other cheap sequels, of course.
The spoofs are also very amusing. For example, in "From Honey, With Love" Wayne is showing some foreign buyers some metal at GENTEK, which they try to steal, when Dalton Pierce shows up. He's a Canadian secret agent, and impressed by Wayne's gadgets. He joins Dalton's organization taking the code letter P ("Oh, I can just hear: 'Let's get P on this one'."). When the superspy is accidently blinded by one of Wayne's inventions, P takes his place, trying to trap a villian on the Canadian submarine Scotia. He finds it has been abandoned and the villian has left explination of his death (the way villians would tell Bond) on the computer, where Wayne can listen like on voice mail, "If you were suprised, press one. If you saw it coming, press two." Wayne then finds a bomb left to destroy the ship, and, when failing to disarm it, uses his hand-held shrink ray to turn it into a tiny explosion. Better than Austin Powers, Get Smart or Spy Hard.
Theres so much more about this show I cant list it all, see it for urself!
