Zenon wins!

It was a fairly close championship matchup, but Zenon emerged victorious. Thanks for voting!

Smart House

Some may call it a silly tween Disney Channel Original Movie, but I call it the 1984 of our generation.

Smart House affirms every 9-year-old kid’s dream about what the future of technology would hold, just as George Orwell did in his historic novel 1984. Smart House was Disney’s attempt in 1999 to predict where we would be in the new millennium, which at the time was very unknown.

In case you lived under a rock for your entire childhood or weren’t lucky enough to have cable, Smart House is a story of a brother-sister duo, Ben and Angie Cooper, who lose their mother. Their dad, Nick Cooper, is left to hold the family together. He has a tough time managing his career along with basic household chores. Clearly the concept of “Mr. Mom” was not too trendy yet.

His son, middle schooler Ben (Ryan Merriman) enters and wins a contest, with the grand prize of a “house of the future” named Pat who will take care of the home’s every need. Pat has the ability to interact with the family and study their habits (creepy). In 2013 terms, it’s as if a super-sized Siri were installed in everyone’s home.  

At first, this is clearly every kid’s dream. Plus, in Ben’s case it’s a way to help his family. But after a fun mid-movie montage of the good life living with Pat, all is not what it seems. Ben’s dad starts dating Pat’s creator Sara, which causes Ben to mess with Pat’s programming to make her more like a substitute mother. Big mistake.

After Ben and Angie have a “wild” party with all of their middle school friends while their dad is out, Pat helps them cover up the party. Sure enough, Nick finds out and scolds Pat for helping the kids lie. Pat becomes a little nutty after that and eventually locks the family inside the house because the outside world is just too dangerous.

Ben figures out the only way to stop Pat is to tell her she isn’t real (sort of harsh). Pat actually appears as a hologram of a ’50s housewife, and Ben tells her this to her “face.”.

With its hip, jazzy soundtrack and ’90s staples — brick-sized cellphones, spiky-haired school bullies and standard-def quality — Smart House is not only an entertaining movie but has a couple of deeper messages as well:

1. Don’t volunteer to be the first to test new technology. No one wants to be the guinea pig.

2. Don’t throw parties while your parent(s) aren’t home. They will find out.

3. A “smart house” should not be Apple’s next venture. Let’s just stick to smartphones.

While Smart House lacks what other DCOMs can offer (dance numbers, musical breaks or even any star quality,) it holds a special place in every ’90s kid’s heart. This is one of the originals, one of the classics. Don’t forget that, kids.

— René Salvatore

Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century

Filmmakers clearly have some pretty big expectations about the future — piles of fancy technology, totally re-imagined social, cultural and political structures, not to mention sometimes terrifying fashion. But there are few better futures to imagine than the one of 2049 created by Disney in its 1999 classic Zenon: Girl of the 21stCentury, a movie about a girl who lives on a space station but must adjust to life on earth after her parents send her there for misbehaving. 

Here are some reasons why Zenon’s future is so great.

1. Girl power. Zenon is fearless and confident, everything many female leads are not. Though she can be a little rambunctious, she was a fantastic role model for the young girls who were watching this movie when it came out. She’ll do anything – float around in outer space unsupervised during a class five solar flare just for the view, defeat a corporate giant with an evil scheme to take down the space station and meet her idol without any sort of trepidation. She is witty and resourceful, vibrant and passionate. She was basically everything I wanted to be when I was 9 years old.

2. Speaking of girl power, the president in 2049 is a Clinton — Chelsea Clinton. Hopefully, she’s not the first woman in charge, but it’s nice that Disney even thought to do that. I’m going to pretend it’s because Disney wanted to make a feminist statement and not because Bill Clinton was in power at the time, and they thought it would be funny. 

3. Even though the style is supposed to be futuristic, it’s so ’90s-early 2000s. Double ponytails held up with scrunchies, spiked hair with frosted bleach tips, pink spandex — it is all glorious.

 4. The music. “Zoom zoom zoom! Make my heart go boom boom!” It’s lucky Microbe’s song is so lovable because once it’s in your head it never really leaves.

5. Zetus Lapetus! The language is fully stellinarious. Whenever I hear it, I’m in, like, orbital bliss major! 

6. Raven-Symone. Nothing else needs to be said.

7. They live on a space station. Imagine waking up every morning to a window completely filled with stars, maybe a planet or two in the distance.

8. The technology. Every future movie has its own ideas about what technology will look like in the future.Zenon’s are especially interesting. For one, the writers thought compact discs would still be in use, just a whole lot smaller. Clearly, that’s not the case, as we are in 2013 already moving past that concept and into cloud computing. In fact, aside from the traveling livable space station, most of the stuff that Zenon uses is within the realm of possibility, if not already in use. However, it is practical and noninvasive technology for the most part, and that’s refreshing. 

In summation, Zenon taught all of us that girls can kick butt, the future is a cool place and boy bands are fully luminarious major. What else could you need to know?

–Kelsey Hughes