The Marvel Comics character Thor officially made his live-action debut in the 1988 TV movie The Incredible Hulk Returns. But the year before that, Thor was a major presence in a teen comedy film about a group of youngsters having a wild night in downtown Chicago. The kids deal with gun-wielding car thieves, knife-wielding gang members, a homicidal tow truck driver, and a lot of other odd characters and dangerous situations. Their lives are put at risk on multiple occasions. And throughout, Thor’s iconic helmet is worn by an eight-year-old girl who looks up to the character… and believes he’s real. By the time the night is over, she might be proven right… Or maybe not. Whatever the case, there’s a whole lot of Thor in the 1987 film Adventures in Babysitting (watch it HERE). And it’s time for it to be Revisited.
Adventures in Babysitting began with a spec script written by David Simkins. Who had worked on a locally-produced TV show as a teenager in his hometown of South Bend, Indiana. After going to film school, he found work assisting producers and earning credits on cult classics like Angel and Children of the Corn. After reading a lot of scripts, Simkins decided to write his own. The result was Adventures in Babysitting, and it was quickly picked up by Hill/Obst Productions, which was headed by Debra Hill, best known for her collaborations with John Carpenter – most famously Halloween – and Lynda Obst, who had previously worked on Flashdance and Risky Business. Hill and Obst weren’t totally on board with Simkins’ story, which involved a babysitter pulling off an elaborate, Ocean’s 11-style heist with her young charges, but they saw potential in the basic concept and had Simkins replace the heist with a series of smaller events.
Paramount Pictures had the right of first refusal for any Hill/Obst projects, so the studio looked at the script – and wanted to make the movie with Molly Ringwald in the lead role of 17-year-old babysitter Chris Parker. Which makes sense. Ringwald would have been a fine choice, and she had just become an ‘80s icon through the John Hughes productions Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink. It would have been a good choice for Ringwald as well, since Adventures in Babysitting made more of an impact than other movies she was working on at that time, like The Pick-up Artist, For Keeps, and Fresh Horses. But she passed on the offer. Paramount briefly considered having the character rewritten for Bette Midler or Cher, but they lost interest before pursuing those options. So Hill and Obst had to find another studio that would be willing to make the movie. That ended up being the Disney label Touchstone Pictures, where Adventures in Babysitting became the first Disney movie to get a PG-13 rating.
Making his feature directorial debut with the film was someone who was partly responsible for the creation of PG-13: Chris Columbus, screenwriter of the Steven Spielberg productions Gremlins, The Goonies, and Young Sherlock Holmes. The ratings board had come up with PG-13 in response to parental uproar over the darkness and violence in Gremlins and another Spielberg movie, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Rather than write something for himself, Columbus had been searching for a script to direct. It was a two year search and he read over a hundred scripts before Adventures in Babysitting landed on his desk. He decided to move ahead with this one because he felt comfortable with the scale of the story.
Auditions for the role of Chris Parker were held across the United States and in the Canadian city of Toronto, Ontario. A hundred and fifty actresses read for the part. Valerie Bertinelli of the recently-ended sitcom One Day at a Time was among those who auditioned. So was Phoebe Cates – and it’s surprising that she didn’t get the job, given the Gremlins connection. But Columbus chose to cast Elisabeth Shue, then best known for being The Karate Kid’s love interest. This wouldn’t be Shue’s first lead role – that came in the killer ape movie Link the year before – but it was still a challenge. She would have to carry the movie and keep it grounded while all sorts of crazy stuff happens around her.
The film memorably begins with Chris getting ready for a date while dancing and singing along to the song “Then He Kissed Me.” But her plans come crashing down when her boyfriend Mike, played by Bradley Whitford, shows up, dressed in his everyday clothes, to tell her that he has to cancel their anniversary dinner because he needs to take care of his sick little sister. With nothing else to do, Chris agrees to babysit for the Andersons. She’s only supposed to be babysitting 8-year-old Sara, played by Maia Brewton. Sara’s 15-year-old brother Brad, played by Keith Coogan, was going to be staying at his friend Daryl’s place… but he has a crush on Chris, so when he finds out she’s going to be watching Sara, he decides to stick around. Soon after Sara and Brad’s parents leave to attend an event in Chicago, Chris gets a call from someone else in the city. Her friend Brenda, played by Penelope Ann Miller, has gotten sick of her stepmom and decided to run away from home, but now she’s stuck at a bus station and needs Chris to come pick her up. It’s a thirty minute drive into Chicago and Chris tells the kids she’ll be back in an hour. But they insist on going with her. And Brad’s friend Daryl, played by Anthony Rapp, invites himself along as well.
The night continues going downhill from there. Chris’s mom’s car gets a flat tire and they get a ride from a tow truck driver who gets distracted by his mission to murder his wife’s lover. With bullets flying around them, they seek shelter in another car – which is being stolen by Joe Gipp, played by Calvin Levels. Joe is a nice guy, but he makes the questionable decision to take Chris and the kids to a chop shop where crime boss Bleak and his right hand man Graydon, played by John Chandler and Ron Canada, don’t take kindly to their presence. And get more upset when Daryl steals a Playboy that has their business plans written down on the centerfold, featuring a model with an uncanny resemblance to Chris.
With no transportation and criminals on their tail, Chris and the kids have to navigate their way through Chicago, avoid danger, save Brenda, and get Chris’s mom’s car back. This adventure takes them through a blues club, onto the L train, to a hospital, a restaurant, where Mike is on a date with someone else, through a frat party, into – and outside – the skyscraper that was then known as the Associates Center, and to Dawson’s Garage, where the owner is played by Vincent D’Onofrio and may or may not be Thor.
The Sara character has a fascination with Thor that’s so intense, she wears his winged helmet all through the movie and has his hammer Mjolnir close at hand. This was not in earlier drafts of David Simkins’ script. It was, along with the Chicago setting (despite the fact that Simkins grew up near Chicago), brought to the project by Chris Columbus. The director had been a Marvel Comics fan since childhood. They inspired him to get into the entertainment industry. He considered becoming a comic book artist, but figured filmmaking would be a better fit for him. And he was able to work his love for Marvel into Adventures in Babysitting. He also paid tribute to Gremlins with the backpack Sara wears.
Adventures in Babysitting is a mostly family-friendly movie… but there’s also content some parents might find objectionable. It has young kids as leads, but that doesn’t keep it from having a bit of edge. As mentioned, it has gun-toting criminals and bloodthirsty gang members, as well as a tow truck driver who’s out to kill. There’s a minor stabbing, nudity-free glimpses at an issue of Playboy, and a cheating boyfriend getting kicked in the ass. There are even a couple of F-bombs, including one in the most iconic line. It earned that PG-13. In most cases, the fact that there are two F-bomb lines back-to-back would have earned it an R. So the ratings board was being a little lenient here. But don’t worry, when Disney+ dropped the film on their streaming service, they used the cleaned-up TV edit. So when Chris grabs a knife and stands up to the gang member who has just stabbed Brad, she merely tells him, “Don’t fool with the babysitter.”
Despite the harder edge, and possibly because of it, the film earned a lot of young fans in the ‘80s. So it remains a nostalgic favorite for those fans all these decades later. It still holds up as an enjoyable, fast-paced piece of entertainment that sends its characters on the adventure of their lives.
Elisabeth Shue did an excellent job in the lead role, even though she’s tasked with being the serious one while other characters get to have more fun. Maia Brewton is great as Sara, the little girl who’s always going on about Thor and messing with her brother, getting him back for messing with her. Sara makes some choices that raise the stakes – and nearly gets herself killed. Long before we saw Tom Cruise climb the Burj Khalifa, we saw Sara hanging on to the side of the Associates Center. Of course, unlike Cruise, Brewton was hanging onto the side of a set. She was never more than a dozen feet off the ground. Keith Coogan is also great as the high-strung, lovestruck Brad. He went on to co-star in the cult classic Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead four years later, so you can have a good time watching a Coogan Babysitter double feature. Anthony Rapp is highly entertaining as irreverent horndog Daryl. So it’s surprising we haven’t seen him play more guys like this over the years. He’s in another popular teen movie, Dazed and Confused, but he’s one of the more low-key characters there. Speaking on The Today Show, Shue pointed out that the director and many of the actors were just getting started in their careers, and that’s a big reason why the movie is so fun to watch. She said, “There’s just such a grateful energy on a film like that where everybody is excited and it’s new to them. And that kind of energy really, really comes forward.” You can feel it in the finished film.
Chris Columbus’s main reason for requesting a Chicago setting was so he could work some Chicago blues into the film. That led to the most popular scene, where Chris and the kids find themselves on stage in a blues club – and the band, headed up by Albert Collins, won’t let them leave the place without singing the blues. Chris has to come up with a song on the spot. “Babysitting Blues,” with Collins singing along and Brad, Sara, and Daryl singing back-up. Shue told The Today Show the blues club scene was “Probably one of my favorite experiences in film, like at the top, top, top of every experience I had. I had so, so, so much fun. I think you can probably see it in in my performance. I probably had way too much fun.” Viewers have been having fun watching that scene ever since.
Even though the movie takes place in Chicago, much of it was filmed in Toronto. The production went smoothly – except when city workers came along and cleaned up the trash that was being used for set dressing. Crew members had to be posted as guards to make sure that wouldn’t happen again.
Disney was so certain this film would be a success, they signed a long-term deal with Hill/Obst Productions and had them move their offices from Paramount to the Disney lot. Sneak previews of Adventures in Babysitting were held on nearly 500 screens at the end of June 1987 to build up positive word-of-mouth before the film’s wide release on July 3rd… but that tactic didn’t work out as planned. The film had an underwhelming opening weekend. Thankfully, the positive word-of-mouth finally started spreading around. Movie-goers must have started noticing just how cool the poster Drew Struzan designed for the film was. Touchstone also came up with a new ad campaign that was apparently more appealing, because the film’s box office numbers rose forty-three percent on its second weekend and it was on its way to making thirty-four million dollars during its theatrical run. For the initial UK release, Adventures in Babysitting was given the title A Night on the Town – but it got its original title back for later home video releases.
The film was a hit on the big screen, then more fans found it through VHS rentals and airings on cable. Chris Columbus went on to direct more high profile films, including Home Alone movies, Harry Potter movies, and Mrs. Doubtfire. Elisabeth Shue followed Adventures in Babysitting with the Tom Cruise hit Cocktail and the two Back to the Future sequels, and has been working steadily ever since. She earned an Oscar nomination for her performance in the 1995 film Leaving Las Vegas, a job she got because director Mike Figgis counted Adventures in Babysitting as one of his favorites.
The movie was so popular, Hill, Obst, and Simkins tried to continue the story – not with a sequel, but a TV series. A pilot for an Adventures in Babysitting TV show was co-written by Simkins and directed by Joel Zwick. Jennifer Guthrie took over the role of Chris, with Joey Lawrence as Brad, Brian Austin Green as Daryl, Courtney Peldon as Sara, and Ariana Mohit as Brenda. The pilot made it to the air on CBS in July of 1989. It begins with Brad accidentally destroying one of Sara’s Thor toys. When he goes out to get a replacement, it becomes another adventure, involving armed robbery, a hostage situation, and an encounter with an alligator in an abandoned sewer system. CBS didn’t order the show to series, so things went quiet for about twenty years… Until Disney started developing a remake. Directed by John Schultz from a script by Tiffany Paulsen, a new Adventures in Babysitting aired on the Disney Channel in June of 2016. And for the most part, it’s a remake in name only, telling a story about completely different characters going on a different adventure – but with some similarities to the adventure Chris went on in the ‘80s.
The remake drew in viewers, but it came and went while the original film remains a beloved favorite for many who have seen it. Shue said she thinks it endures because, “It’s episodic and its innocence resonates today, just watching these young kids trying to navigate a really complicated world and how they learn and grow from there. Their night out together is obviously timeless. But maybe in today’s world, its innocence kind of shines through.”
It also happens to be a whole lot of fun to watch. So if you haven’t seen Adventures in Babysitting in a while, give it another look. It’s definitely worth revisiting.