Headscratchers / Frankenweenie

• Um, so what exactly did happen to that invisible goldfish? Anyone?
  • It's likely an homage to The Invisible Man, who went insane before disappearing altogether.
    • If it is an homage, then what happened to the Invisible Man was probably what happened to the fish - he vanished forever.
• Why did Sparky need to be patched up before Victor re-animated him? He got hit by a car, not ripped apart by a mountain lion.
  • He got hit by a car. Have you never seen roadkill? It can get ugly.
  • Victor could have taken some of Sparky apart to fix / replace some broken bones or whatnot, and then sewed him back together. He's a corpse technically, and probably won't heal like a normal dog anymore. He obviously had to put some type of contraption in his neck in order to hold the nuts and bolts that conducted the electricity.
• Can one make a 3D home movie?
  • By using two lenses that are eye length apart and putting different colored filters on each one. Victor's a smart kid.
• Were there textbooks around the time this movie takes place in that would say Pluto isn't a planet?
  • The movie takes place in nondescript time period that just looks ambiguously like the '50s.
• I know Idiot Ball and Drama Ball, but how long was Victor expecting to keep Sparky's reanimation secret from his parents?
  • He is a child. Child Prodigy maybe, but still a child. They don't always think these things through.
    • Well, to be fair, at first he did manage to keep it a secret from his parents! They only found out because of unwitting instigators of doom that Victor didn't predict and thus couldn't control.
    • Needing a muffin tin counts as an instigator of doom?
• Why exactly is this movie called "Frankenweenie"? The dog is named Sparky, the owner is named Frankenstein, and there's no "weenie" anywhere... Couldn't they have just called it "Frankensparky?"
  • Maybe the producers originally planned the film to star a dachshund (AKA wiener dog) instead of a terrier, and didn't get around to changing the title?
  • Possibly just a catchier name. The dog in the original was a Bull Terrier. And it was probably a creative choice to more quickly indicate the Frankenstein's Monster of the movie was a dog. Frankenweenie is a touch snappier than Frankenbullterrier or even just Frankenterrier.
• Why did all the other reanimation stuff not work, but Sparky did? I know there's the "they-weren't-friends-with-the-animals-and-friendship-trumps-all" hypothesis, but two problems with that one is that a) two of them (Shelly and Colossus) were pets, so surely there'd be some friendship there, and b) How could, scientifically speaking, an emotion effect the results of the experiment?
  • Technically, Colossus' reanimation worked. He was just squashed and killed by Shelley.
  • Mad science is not bound by your puny logic!
  • Could've been entirely a stroke of luck on Victor's part. His entire experiment was based on an untested variable mixed with a half baked hypothesis. There could've been some unnoticeable differences in the atmosphere/lightning/anything else the night he brought Sparky back to life. Not to mention his reanimation formula. If there was an impurity in the formula's materials or something different about the lighting that reanimated the pets, it could've been a number of things.
  • Also consider the types of animals/what they were to the children when they were reanimated
    • Nassor's pet seems the closest to the goal that he set out to achieve. It could be because his pet was a mammal and there was no outside interference with the reanimation itself, and Colossus was a pet that was clearly dear to him. As Colossus was the only mammalian pet whose resurrection was normal, it could be due to these specific parameters. As Victor's initial experiment was to revive his pet dog.
    • Edgar was attempting to resurrect a random dead rat he found in the garbage. While a bat IS a mammal, it was still originally a wild animal with no connection to the child that tried to revive it. So it's no wonder it simply went wild once revived and didn't take orders from it's resurrector.
    • Weird Girl was attempting to resurrect a random bat which came into her possession. Which ended up fused with Mr Whiskers the cat. While this one Did have her pet cat in the mix, the base animal being revived wasn't a pet. Combined with the fact Mr Whiskers was hybridized by the resurrection, it's unlikely that the bat part of him was inclined to listen to the cat's original owner.
    • Toshiaki's pet, Shelley, was a turtle. While Shelley was a pet in life, unlike the previous examples, turtles are not mammals. Which could have confuddled the results. Combined with the fact Shelley was soaked in Miracle Gro, the chemical could have reacted with the process and made it go wild. Not being loyal to its owner like Colossus.
      • Alternatively, growing to such a massive size near-instantaneously after returning to life, unless the plant food sustained him somehow, would have resulted in Shelley's now-gigantic body demanding an equally massive amount of food to survive. As he was now apparently a carnivore based on those teeth, whatever loyalty Shelley might have had to his owner upon resurrection was overridden by an instinctive response to avoid starving to death. Hence his proceeding rampage through the heavily-populated town, the biggest and most obvious source of food for a giant and extremely hungry carnivore.
    • Much like the example of Shelley, Sea Monkeys aren't mammals by any stretch of the imagination. Rather being a type of brine shrimp. Not to mention, these creatures, when preserved and sealed in a package for transportation, as they were commonly sent in the mail, they're technically not even dead. And Given it seems Bob electrified them straight from the package, it's likely he wasn't 'reviving' them at all, and simply gave them a supercharge that turned them large and monstrous. Combined with the fact that they weren't yet rehydrated, and thus spent no time as Bob's pet, they had no connection with him and had no issue turning on him once energized.
• What happens if Mr Whiskers dreams about someone but doesn't have to "go" afterwards?
  • WMG, but maybe he could scratch the letter in his litterbox, or the ground, or somewhere else. However, this would make it harder for Weird Girl to show people... unless she dug around the letter.
• How old are Victor and his classmates supposed to be? What grade are they in? Most of them look like they could be somewhere in middle school... except Nassor. Nassor both looks and sounds more like a young adult. It doesn't help that he has the oldest voice actor of all the kids (Martin Short, who was 62 at the film's release) while the other kids are voiced by younger actors (some more than others, though.)
  • The sign on the front of Victor's school denotes the name "New Holland Elementary". And given the level of science they were learning, it's likely Victor's class is a fifth or sixth grade one. Which would probably place the majority of them somewhere in the range of 11 or 12. As for Nassor, well it's likely his appearance is more for the sake of homage than accuracy of how a child would look.

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