Smart House premiered on June 26th, 1999 and is the 8th DCOM to be released.
This movie is about a boy named Ben Cooper, who wins a contest and earns a high tech house of the futures as his prize for his family to live in, but the house soon tries to start running their lives
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The movie starts with run of the mill DCOM scenario. The parents aren’t divorced, but the mother is dead. I don’t mind the idea of a parent being dead as a psychological conflict a character faces, but it happens enough in the animated Disney movies to the point that its so overdone. Not only that, but divorce is much more common, and relateable.
But what was interesting was seeing Ben being against his dad dating and leaving his marriage with his mother behind him. That’s something that’s difficult to get over, but then again, its a recycled plot point from Under Wraps (1997). Two years is really quick to recycle something like that.
The protagonist Ben has known about a contest to win the first high tech house of the future by just filling out an info card, and he wins by filling out thousands of them since the contest allows multiple entries. At first the dad is super skeptical, typical dad.
The smarthouse seems to be inspired by innovations Walt Disney proposed with Epcot. If you’ve ever been to Epcot Theme Park or rode the Carousel of Progress in Magic Kingdom, and it’s nice to see Disney Channel pulling something like that from the parks, even if a lot of those visions were an old, and really silly, idea of what the future should look like.
The smarthouse has an AI system like Siri, except its name is Pat. That’s one thing the house of the future got right, was the use of AI. But Pat is a lot different from Siri. It greatly contributes to making the house fit all of their comforts and needs. It picks out the perfect clothes out of their closets based on the weather and their moods, same goes for food, the floor can clean itself, and the best part, it creates an alarm that the kids don’t mind waking up to, even on a school day.
Things are all fine and dandy until Pat starts screwing up a little, causing Sara, the woman who made the house to come over and fix bugs, and the dad starts falling for her. Ben can see whats going on and starts messing with the control room of the house. He uploads a ton of shows from the 50s for Pat to watch so Pat will start to behave more maternally, that way Ben can convince his dad there is no need for a new mom or wife.
The tweaking that Ben did causes Pat’s behavior to escalate really quickly. It gets to the point that, while the dad and Sara are off on a date, Pat sets up a massive party and invites all of the kids in Ben’s class, solely for embarrassing a kid bullying Ben and so Ben can have fun with his crush and friends and like Pat more. This scene was actually kind of awesome minus Pat’s destructive nature toward the bully. I cant remember the last time I saw kids dance like that when it wasn’t a kidz bop video.
Eventually Pat’s behavior becomes so bad that she locks Ben and his family in the house and wont let them leave. Ben and Sara work together to take down Pat. Instead of deleting Pat completely, Sara just gets rid of the bugs that Ben added and she’s actually pretty cool and still helps out around they house. Ben actually learned to give Sara a chance after really getting to know her when taking down Pat.
This movie can be considered one of the better early DCOMs and seeing all of the innovations around the house was really something. Some of the features of the house weren’t even used in Epcot or anywhere in Disney World. A big issue was the characters weren’t great. They weren’t something you want to latch on to like you do Zenon or Marnie from Halloween Town, but you can still say that Ben went through some development.
One thing I never understood was that the mother died in an ice skating accident? Like???? That stuff leaves you injured but I’ve never heard of it killing. The Fuck Disney Channel?
All of that aside I have to say this, the only thing that made this movie so good was the house itself and all of imagination behind it, but that’s where all of the imagination in this show seemed to go. Most of the characters and relationships in this show are for plot points. The conflict with his dad and Sara, the relationship between his dad and Sara, the kid who bullies him, the girl he has a crush on. It was all relateable, but it lacked a bit of depth or humor.
Not only that, but there was hardly anything to point out in this show that really brought 90s nostalgia.
I’m gonna give it a 2.5/5
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