INSPECTOR GADGET

INSPECTOR GADGET. David Kellog, dir. Jeff Berry and Kerry Ehrin, script. USA: Disney, 1999. Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, Rupert Everett, featured players.

Animated TV show made into a live-action, science-fantasy movie for children. A "nerdy security officer" played by Broderick is killed and then reanimated as "the repository of 14,000 automatic devices, turning him, as the creators of the film put it, 'into a human Swiss Army Knife' called Inspector Gadget. Using his newfound ability as a robotic wonder Gadget battles The Claw [sic: he prefers just "Claw"] in the villain's relentless pursuit of world domination" (52). Pre-release coverage by Mitch Persons, Cinefantastique 31.7 (August 1999): 52-53, whom we quote.

Of considerable interest for gender, genre, and Queer studies; of somewhat less interest for the human/machine interface, but note (1) Gadget as a comic variation on the usually somber theme of total prosthesis: cf. and contrast D. Knight's "Masks" and ROBOCOP (1987); (2) Claw's artificial hand explicitly called a po-mo variation on Captain Hook; (3) Gadget's car as a rapper variation on KITT of the Knight Rider TV series; (4) the remote-controlled robot vehicles Claw uses; (5) the valuing of "heart" and will over "head" imaged in Gadget's (second) resurrection, recovering consciousness even when his main processing chip is removed, and related to the valid principle in physiology and psychology that our command of our muscles is more subconscious than thought through (cf. and contrast STAR WARS saga on feelings and the TERMINATOR movies for machine resurrection). Gadget's mechanization is usually hidden but comically banal when being installed and fairly inelegant when deployed—by use of a silly and almost magical spoken formula—and contrasts with the elegance of Claw, Rupert Everett's dandified villain, the head of a large corporation. Technology here is good when cute, associated with a smart woman and a barely middle-class (fairly stupid, but good-hearted) male—plus a girl, grandfather figure, and a dog—and used by the forces of righteousness; technology becomes evil when stolen and misapplied by a male, upper-class villain, the head of a large, high-tech corporation.

RDE, Title, 23Aug19

(RDE, 27/06/99, 03/08/99)