Screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski pitched the film as a dark comedy, parodying films such as Mr Mom and Three Men And A Baby, but squarely aiming for an adult audience.Ģ0th Century Fox, Warner Bros, Columbia, and Disney all turned the script down before Universal greenlit it and, for some reason, decided to make it into a more family-friendly films. The premise came from an LA Times article about a married couple suing an adoption agency for not disclosing that their foster son had severe mental health issues and violent tendencies. Pitched somewhere between Dennis The Menace and The Omen, this one winds up being a little dark for a PG comedy, but that’s because it was designed that way.
While Flo largely wants the social status of motherhood, it’s Ben who bears the brunt of rituals such as camping trips, birthday parties and baseball games gone horribly, horribly wrong.
The latest victims are troubled couple Ben (John Ritter) and Flo (Amy Yasbeck), who endure a catalogue of disasters. He terrorises the nuns who look after him, he writes to the famed Bow-Tie Killer (Michael Richards) as a pen-pal, and he’s gone through more than 30 pairs of adoptive parents. In Problem Child, Junior (Michael Oliver) is a precociously violent 7-year-old living in an orphanage. Looking at it in the 1990s context, though, Scorsese chooses a hit comedy from the previous year whose characters also happen to include an anxious dad contending with a maniac. The choice of family cinema outing frankly says as much about Nick Nolte’s character as Robert De Niro’s raucous laughter does about Cady’s mania. “You’ve adopted Satan.” 1990’s Problem Child lives in infamy as the film that Max Cady enjoyed so loudly while puffing on a noxious cigar in Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear. From family-friendly films to blockbusters we shouldn’t have been watching, get ready for a monthly dose of nostalgia, as we put down our VHS tapes and find out whether the 90s on Netflix are still Live & Kicking. On Fridays, he flashes back to the golden decade of our childhood. Watch Problem Child online in the UK: Netflix UKĭo you remember the 1990s? Mark does. It's flattering and awesome when people give you that recognition, but you can't say it doesn't get old."Īs for whether he watches either of the "Problem Child" movies if they're on TV: "I avoid it like the plague."Ĭheck out the gallery above to see more child stars now - and click here to see Oliver reunite with Trixie from "Problem Child 2.Cast: Michael Oliver, John Ritter, Amy Yasbeck, Michael Richards, Jack Warden
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Picture going out to see a movie with your friends and getting recognized and people not understanding you just want to see a movie. "One of the things I learned real young is how precious privacy is. If someone told me that I could go back to where I was before the lawsuit, I'd deny it. "I've seen the top, I've seen the bottom, I know what both extremes are like. These days, Oliver works in tech support and couldn't be happier. I work my ass off, I have a 9-5, a normal existence. "I started to realize that I want a normal life. I was kinda done with it anyway," he says now. "I think it was a mutual breakup between me and the industry. He left his acting career behind around the same time. It was a good couple years that we were completely busted up."
"We ended up staying with friends for a while, slowly dusted ourselves up. "After all that, after the impact on morale that that left our family with, everything took a downturn," Oliver told Gottfried. Damn shame."Ī bitter contract dispute over "Problem Child 2" left his family without anything, something he says took its toll.
It's a pity he's no longer around, I would love to reconnect to him. "He was really nice to me on the set and I think he kind of knew that I was very new to all of it. I remember he got me a radio controlled car right after we met," Oliver, now 33, says of Ritter. To mark the film's 25th anniversary, costar Gilbert Gottfried tracked Oliver down for his podcast, where the former child star opened up about working with the late John Ritter, his swift exit from Hollywood and revealed what he's up to now. The film was a surprise success, quickly spawning a sequel - but Oliver all but vanished from showbiz shortly after, thanks to a lawsuit filed against his family from Universal Pictures. Michael Oliver memorably played John Ritter's adopted son in the two "Problem Child" films, the first of which came out 25 years ago today.
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