Daniel sent us this one — the Baby Geniuses sequel, specifically the one that's gathered this weird cult following despite being, by the numbers, one of the worst-reviewed films ever made. He's asking who actually wrote the original and came up with the concept, how it did at the box office, whether the critical drubbing killed the sequel's chances, and then the bigger question — for parents or anyone who finds the whole secret-baby-language premise funny, what other movies play in that same sandbox?
I have to say, I went into this thinking I knew the broad strokes, and then I started pulling the actual production history and realized I knew basically nothing. The origin story of this franchise is genuinely strange.
Give me the shape of the strangeness.
The concept and the original script came from a guy named Bob Clark. And if that name sounds familiar to anyone who's into film history, it should. This is the same Bob Clark who directed A Christmas Story.
The leg lamp movie.
The leg lamp movie. Also directed Porky's, which was for a brief period the highest-grossing Canadian film ever made. And he directed Black Christmas, which basically invented the slasher genre before Halloween — it came out four years before John Carpenter's film and established almost every convention we now associate with the genre. The killer's-point-of-view shots, the holiday setting, the final girl, the ambiguous ending where the killer might still be out there. All of that originated with Bob Clark. So this is not some hack who stumbled into a talking-babies idea. This is a guy with a eclectic, sometimes brilliant filmography who, in the late nineties, decides his next project is going to be about infants who possess a universal secret language.
The man who gave us Ralphie in the bunny suit also gave us babies spouting dubbed-in adult voices. That's a career arc.
Here's where it gets weirder. Clark didn't just dash off the script. He'd been trying to make Baby Geniuses for something like a decade before it actually got produced. He wrote it with a co-writer named Greg Michael, and the premise was ambitious for what was ostensibly a kids' movie. The idea is that all babies are born with a universal knowledge — they understand the secrets of the universe, they communicate in a shared pre-verbal language, and then around age two they "cross over" and forget everything. The villain, played by Kathleen Turner in the original, is running a secret lab trying to crack that baby code.
It's essentially a gnostic creation myth dressed up in diapers and slapstick.
That is the most accurate description of Baby Geniuses I have ever heard. And I think that's actually part of why it's fascinated people. Underneath the pratfalls and the CGI baby mouths — which we will get to — there is an actual science fiction premise here that has roots in some interesting questions about infant cognition. We're talking about a film that, at its conceptual core, is asking: what if the pre-verbal mind isn't a blank slate but a kind of fading transmission from somewhere else?
Which is a question that shows up in philosophy and theology going back centuries. The idea that infants arrive with knowledge that gets eroded by language acquisition.
Plato's anamnesis, the idea that all learning is actually recollection of knowledge the soul possessed before birth. Wordsworth's "trailing clouds of glory do we come." This is a deep cultural archetype that Bob Clark decided to express through a scene where a baby fights a man in a mascot costume. The tonal whiplash is part of what makes the whole enterprise so compelling to revisit.
All right, let's talk box office. Because my memory is that the first film actually made money, and that's the part that surprised me when I looked at the numbers.
Baby Geniuses came out in March of nineteen ninety-nine, and it opened at number two at the box office behind Forces of Nature with Ben Affleck and Sandra Bullock. It made about five point six million dollars its opening weekend and went on to gross roughly twenty-seven million domestically against a production budget of around twelve to thirteen million. So it was profitable. Not a blockbuster by any stretch, but Sony's TriStar Pictures made their money back and then some on home video.
That domestic-versus-international split matters here, doesn't it? Because kids' movies often have a long tail overseas.
They do, and Baby Geniuses actually did decent business internationally — not massive numbers, but enough to push it solidly into the black. The foreign box office added another nine or ten million, which on a twelve-million-dollar budget means the film was comfortably profitable before you even factor in the home video revenue, which for a kids' movie in the late nineties was substantial. This was the era when parents were building DVD libraries for their kids, and anything with a recognizable poster at Blockbuster could move units.
Which is why the sequel existed at all.
And the sequel is where the story takes a turn into fascinating disaster territory. Superbabies: Baby Geniuses Two came out in two thousand four, five years later. Bob Clark returned to direct. But between the first film and the sequel, basically everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
Walk me through the cascade.
First, the critical reception to the original was absolutely brutal. It holds a two percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert gave it one and a half stars and called it — and I'm quoting here — "a film that is bad enough to make you want to throw up." But critics don't kill kids' movies. Parents rent them on video and kids watch them on repeat. So the financial logic for a sequel was still there.
The Peppa Pig principle. No critic has ever stopped a toddler from consuming what they want to consume.
But what did kill the sequel's momentum was the production itself. The budget for Superbabies dropped significantly — about nine million dollars, down from the original's twelve or thirteen. The cast was almost entirely replaced. Jon Voight, who had been in the first film, did not return as the villain. They brought in Scott Baio and Vanessa Angel. And the distribution was handled by a company called Triumph Films, which was basically a Sony subsidiary that handled lower-tier releases.
The Charles in Charge guy.
The very same. And the film was released in August of two thousand four, which in the film industry is widely known as a dumping ground. You release a movie in late August when you have no faith in it whatsoever. It's the calendar equivalent of putting something in a drawer and hoping nobody opens it.
How did it do?
It made about nine point four million dollars worldwide. Against a nine million dollar budget. So it basically broke even, if that, and disappeared from theaters almost immediately. But here's the thing — and this is where the cult following comes in — Superbabies didn't die. It found a second life on DVD, and then later on streaming, and then on lists of the worst movies ever made. It currently holds a zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes, which is an almost impossible achievement. Zero percent with no positive reviews at all.
A perfect score, in its own way.
And people started seeking it out specifically because of that reputation. There's a whole subculture of bad-movie enthusiasts who treat Superbabies as a kind of holy grail. It's not just bad — it's bewilderingly bad. The CGI mouth movements on the babies are somehow worse than the original, despite five years of technological advancement. The plot involves a media mogul villain who wants to brainwash children through television, which is a premise that sounds more unsettling the more you think about it. And there's a scene where a baby, I am not making this up, uses a jetpack.
Of course there is.
The jetpack scene is real. And I think that's the moment where most viewers either check out entirely or decide they're all in. There's no middle ground with a baby jetpack.
Can we talk about the media mogul villain for a second? Because brainwashing children through television is a plot point that feels like it was written by someone who had genuine anxieties about the medium.
I think that's absolutely right. Bob Clark came up in the seventies, when there was a lot of cultural anxiety about television as a tool of manipulation. And he puts that anxiety into a kids' movie in a way that's almost subliminal. The villain's scheme is to use a satellite network to broadcast a signal that will control children's minds. If you describe that plot to someone who hasn't seen the movie, they'd assume you're talking about a dystopian thriller, not a movie where a baby in a suit does a pratfall.
It's the same guy who made Black Christmas. The horror instincts never fully went away.
They really didn't. And I think that's part of what makes the Baby Geniuses films so tonally strange. Clark keeps smuggling horror-movie logic into what's supposed to be a family comedy. The secret lab, the surveillance, the children in peril — these are thriller elements that he just never stopped using, even when the project called for something lighter.
I want to circle back to something you said about the underlying premise, because I think this is what Daniel was really getting at. The whole "babies have a secret language" idea didn't start with Bob Clark. It's been a recurring fantasy in popular culture, and I think every parent has had that moment where their kid is babbling and you think, no, there's something in there, they're trying to communicate something specific and I just can't access it.
There's actually some scientific grounding for this, which I think makes it more compelling. Infant-directed speech — what we call parentese — is a real phenomenon. Babies are born with the capacity to distinguish all the phonemes of all human languages, and they start losing that capacity around six to ten months as they specialize in the language they hear around them. So there is a window where a baby's brain is doing something that adult brains can't replicate. The movie just takes that and runs with it into full science fiction territory.
That's fascinating. So a six-month-old can hear distinctions in Mandarin that I would need years of training to recover.
A baby born in Stockholm can distinguish between sounds that only exist in Zulu or Thai or Hindi. Their brains are universal language processors, and then the pruning starts. By the time they're a year old, they've already started specializing. By two, the window is mostly closed. So the "crossing over" concept in Baby Geniuses isn't pulled from nowhere — it's a fantastical version of a real developmental process.
The premise is not as absurd as the execution would suggest.
And I think that's why the genre has legs. The secret baby language movie is its own little subgenre, and some of the entries are actually quite good.
Let's go through them, because Daniel specifically asked for recommendations in this space.
The obvious starting point is Look Who's Talking from nineteen eighty-nine. This was written and directed by Amy Heckerling, who had just come off directing Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The premise is that a baby, played by a baby but voiced by Bruce Willis, narrates his own life from infancy onward.
That movie was a genuine phenomenon.
Look Who's Talking made about two hundred ninety-seven million dollars worldwide on a budget of seven and a half million. It spawned two sequels. It was the fourth highest-grossing film of nineteen eighty-nine. And the gimmick is slightly different from Baby Geniuses — the babies aren't communicating with each other, they're just thinking in a fully articulate adult voice that we the audience can hear — but the core appeal is the same. It's the fantasy of knowing what's going on in there.
The Bruce Willis casting was inspired, because you've got this tough-guy action star voice coming out of a gurgling infant. The contrast is what makes it work.
The sequel, Look Who's Talking Too, added Roseanne Barr as the voice of the baby sister, which is an even more absurd juxtaposition. That one made forty-seven million on a budget of thirteen, so still profitable but clearly diminishing returns. By the third one, Look Who's Talking Now, they'd switched to dogs voiced by Danny DeVito and Diane Keaton, and the whole thing had run its course.
The talking-animal pivot. The classic sign that a franchise has lost the plot.
Here's what I find interesting. Look Who's Talking came out almost a full decade before Baby Geniuses, and it proved there was a massive audience for this premise. So Bob Clark wasn't operating in a vacuum. He was trying to take that same appeal and add more of a sci-fi conspiracy layer on top of it.
Which, in theory, should have made it more interesting.
And I think that's the tragedy of Baby Geniuses. The ingredients are interesting. You've got a director with a track record of making weird premises work. You've got a premise that taps into something parents actually wonder about. You've got a villain played by Kathleen Turner doing a full camp performance. But the execution just collapses under the weight of the technical challenges. The CGI wasn't there yet, the tone is all over the place, and the babies can't actually act — they're just babies being babies while adults dub lines over them.
What else is in this genre? Because I feel like there's a whole constellation of these films that don't get discussed together.
There's actually quite a few. In nineteen ninety-four there was a film called Baby's Day Out, written by John Hughes, which is not exactly about secret baby language but is absolutely about a baby navigating the adult world with a kind of pre-verbal intelligence that the adults around him completely underestimate. The baby crawls through a construction site, escapes kidnappers, and ends up in a gorilla enclosure at the zoo. It was a flop domestically but huge in South Asia for reasons that nobody has ever fully explained.
John Hughes wrote a baby action movie.
And it's bizarre. But it plays on the same fantasy — that babies understand more than we think they do, that they're operating on a different plane of awareness. There's also Three Men and a Baby from nineteen eighty-seven, which is more of a domestic comedy but has moments where the baby's perspective is treated as this mysterious, almost alien intelligence that the three men are trying to decode.
Then there's the darker version of this premise.
The horror-adjacent version. The nineteen seventy-four film It's Alive, directed by Larry Cohen, is about a mutant baby that goes on a killing spree. That spawned two sequels and a remake. And while that's not exactly what Daniel was asking about, it's the flip side of the same coin. The baby as unknowable other. The baby as something that looks human but might not be fully human in the ways we understand.
The horror version and the comedy version are both grappling with the same anxiety. You've brought this creature into your home and you have no idea what's going on in its head. It could be a genius, it could be a monster, it could be both.
I think that's why the genre persists. It's not really about babies. It's about the limits of communication. Every parent goes through this experience of trying to understand a pre-verbal human who is clearly having thoughts and feelings and can't express them. The movies just literalize that gap.
There's a moment I remember from when my kid was maybe nine months old. He was staring at a ceiling fan with this expression of absolute concentration, and I had this very clear thought: he's working something out right now, something I can't access, and I will never know what it was. That's the feeling these movies are trying to capture.
That's a profound experience that almost every parent has. The movies just take that feeling and say, what if the answer were ridiculous? What if he's not contemplating the nature of rotation but actually calculating orbital mechanics in a secret baby language? The comedy comes from the gap between the profundity of the real experience and the absurdity of the fictional explanation.
If someone's watched Baby Geniuses or Superbabies and thought, I want more of this but maybe slightly better executed, what's the actual recommendation list?
Look Who's Talking is the obvious one — it holds up surprisingly well, mostly because Amy Heckerling is a good writer and the Bruce Willis voiceover is legitimately funny. Baby's Day Out is fascinating as a John Hughes artifact even if it's not a great movie. And then there's a more recent entry that I think deserves more attention, which is The Boss Baby from twenty seventeen.
The Alec Baldwin one.
And The Boss Baby is interesting because it takes the premise in a completely different direction. The baby isn't secretly communicating with other babies in a hidden language — the baby is literally a corporate manager sent from Baby Corp to stop puppies from getting more love than babies. It's absurd, but it's based on a picture book by Marla Frazee, and DreamWorks turned it into a franchise that grossed over five hundred million dollars worldwide and got an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature.
The talking-baby premise, when executed competently, can absolutely print money.
That's the thing. Bob Clark was trying to do something in live action that animation handles much more gracefully. When you animate a baby, you can control every expression, every gesture. When you're working with actual infants on a set, you're basically filming hours of footage and hoping you can cobble something together in post-production.
Which brings us back to the CGI mouth issue.
The CGI mouth issue is the defining aesthetic problem of the Baby Geniuses franchise. In the first film, they used a combination of animatronic baby heads and early digital mouth replacement. The result is deeply uncanny. The babies' mouths move in ways that human mouths don't move. It lands right in the uncanny valley, and I think that's a big part of why critics reacted so viscerally. It's not just that the movie is silly — it's that it looks wrong in a way that's hard to articulate.
The visual equivalent of a wrong note.
In Superbabies, they somehow made it worse. The budget was lower, the technology hadn't advanced enough to compensate, and the result is a film that feels like it was made by people who had stopped caring.
Do we know anything about what Bob Clark thought of all this? Because he had a real career before and after these films.
Clark's career is fascinating. After Superbabies, he directed a couple of lower-budget films that didn't make much impact. And then in two thousand seven, he and his son were killed by a drunk driver in Los Angeles. It's a tragic end to a interesting filmography.
That's awful.
And I think it's part of why I find it hard to be purely dismissive of the Baby Geniuses films. They're bad movies, but they were made by someone who had made good movies and was trying something ambitious. The ambition just exceeded the available tools.
That's a generous reading.
I'm a generous person.
It's one of your more exhausting qualities.
Let me try to pull together the through line here. The secret baby language genre exists because it taps into something real — the experience of living with a pre-verbal human who is clearly thinking and feeling things you can't access. The best versions of this premise, like Look Who's Talking, lean into the comedy of the contrast between the baby's inner monologue and outer reality. The worst versions, like Superbabies, collapse under the weight of technical limitations and tonal confusion. And the whole genre sits at this strange intersection of family comedy, science fiction, and psychological horror, depending on which way you tilt it.
And I'd add one more thing. I think the cult following around Superbabies specifically is about more than just ironic enjoyment of a bad movie. There's something compelling about watching a film that fails so completely at achieving what it set out to do. It's like watching a building collapse in slow motion. You can see every structural flaw, every bad decision, and you can't look away.
The architectural-disaster school of film appreciation.
It's not just Superbabies. There's a whole ecosystem of films that people watch specifically because they're fascinating failures. The Room, Troll Two, Birdemic. Superbabies belongs in that category. It's not just bad — it's interestingly bad.
Hannah was teaching Daniel about architecture recently, and I think there's a parallel here. A building that fails structurally is more instructive than one that succeeds quietly. You learn more from the collapse than from the standing.
I think Bob Clark's filmography as a whole is worth studying for that reason. He made A Christmas Story, which is basically a perfect movie. He made Black Christmas, which defined a genre. He made Porky's, which was a cultural phenomenon even if it hasn't aged well. And then he made Baby Geniuses and Superbabies. The range is staggering.
The man contained multitudes. Some of those multitudes were babies with jetpacks.
Now I'm curious — is there a version of this premise that could work today? With modern visual effects, with a writer who really understands the tone, could you make a good Baby Geniuses?
I think the problem is deeper than the effects. The fundamental challenge is that live-action babies can't perform. They're just being babies. And no amount of CGI mouth replacement changes that. Animation solves the problem because you can make the character do whatever you want. Live action, you're always going to be limited by the fact that you're filming an actual infant who doesn't know they're in a movie.
Unless you go the Look Who's Talking route and just use voiceover without trying to make the mouths match. That sidesteps the uncanny valley entirely.
Which is probably why it worked and Baby Geniuses didn't.
Heckerling understood the assignment in a way that Clark maybe didn't. Or maybe Clark understood it but couldn't resist the temptation to go bigger and weirder.
There's something almost admirable about that. The refusal to take the easier path.
That's the thing about Bob Clark. He never took the easy path. Even when the easy path would have been the right one.
To answer the original questions directly — the concept came from Bob Clark, co-written with Greg Michael. The first film made about twenty-seven million on a twelve to thirteen million dollar budget, which was enough to greenlight a sequel. The sequel was made for less money, released in the August dumping ground, and made basically nothing. And the critical reception was so comprehensively negative that the franchise died, but the sheer extremity of that negativity is what created the cult following.
For people looking for similar movies, Look Who's Talking is the gold standard, Baby's Day Out is the fascinating curiosity, The Boss Baby is the modern animated version, and if you want the horror flip side, It's Alive is waiting for you.
Superbabies itself is available for anyone who wants to experience a zero percent Rotten Tomatoes score firsthand.
Which I recommend. Not because it's good. Because it's instructive.
Like studying a bridge collapse to learn engineering.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the early Renaissance, Mongolian traders along the Silk Road introduced a gambling game to Venetian merchants involving painted sheep knucklebones. The game's payout structure was so counterintuitive that it sparked a heated correspondence between two Italian mathematicians about what we now call the division problem — how to fairly split the stakes of an interrupted game of chance. This exchange, which referenced the specific bone-markings of the Mongolian sheep breeds, became one of the foundational texts of probability theory.
From Mongolia to Venice to the foundations of modern statistics.
Yeah, that's going to sit with me.
The next time someone asks you where probability theory came from, you can say sheep gambling.
I'm absolutely going to work that into a conversation somehow.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts — it helps people find the show.
Find more at myweirdprompts dot com. We'll be back next week.
With something probably less baby-oriented.
One can only hope.
