Ep. 155 - Baby Geniuses

Throwback Theater

I'm tired and lazy so here's the first few paragraphs of the movie from Wikipedia. Baby Geniuses is a 1999 American family comedy film directed by Bob Clark and written by Clark and Greg Michael, from a story by Clark, Steven Paul, Francisca Matos, and Robert Grasmere. It stars Kathleen Turner, Christopher Lloyd, Kim Cattrall, Peter MacNicol, and Ruby Dee. The film has the distinction of being the first full-length feature to use computer-generated imagery for the synthesis of human visual speech. 2D warping techniques were used to digitally animate the mouth viseme shapes of the babies which were originally shot with their mouths closed. The viseme shapes were sampled from syllables uttered by the babies on the set. Baby Geniuses was almost universally panned by critics, who lambasted its acting, humor, special effects, writing, and directing, but it grossed $36.5 million worldwide against a production budget of $12 million. In 2004, it was followed by a sequel, Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, which was a box office bomb, and received even worse critical reviews, receiving a nomination for Worst Picture at the 25th Golden Raspberry Awards. [e-mail]