Over the past few decades, Hollywood has made tremendous strides toward reflecting the changing composition of today's increasingly nontraditional families. Yet one unconventional family paradigm went ignored until 1991's And You Thought Your Parents Were Weird!: the nuclear family headed by a homemade robot inhabited by the soul of a dead man. Joshua Miller and Edan Gross star as a pair of inventor brothers, first seen winning a science fair with an incredible creation that moves garbage from one place to another. Their achievement even draws the attention of an ambitious, snoop-happy reporter (Susan Gibney) prone to breaking into the homes of kid geniuses during her downtime. The enterprising Poindexters put their prize money to good use, constructing a robot named Newman that looks like the bastard offspring of a trash can and a Betamax. The boys initially plan to sell Newman to raise money for their struggling mother (Marcia Strassman), but reevaluate their options after the robot becomes possessed with the spirit of their dead father (Alan Thicke), an inventor presumed to have committed suicide. Understandably delighted to see his family again, Thicke immediately sets about tenderly caressing the angelic faces of his sleeping wife and sons with a gloved metallic hand, in a scene that suggests what a Steven Spielberg film might look like if Spielberg went insane. Thicke then attempts to make the most of his miraculous return from the grave by washing the family car, spraying a little dog with a hose, and finally making small talk with his surprisingly nonchalant quasi-widow. But the couple's tender reunion is cut short by the return of Gibney, who broadcasts red-hot footage of the robotic Thicke groping Strassman's backside, an act that sends a small army of metal fetishists to the family's home. After Thicke outwits a pair of bumbling thieves, provides for his family's future, and kicks a portly, evil kid inventor in the testicles, he returns to heaven, having shed both his mortal coil and his cold, metallic encasement.
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