Never, in a billion years, could a puppet give birth. The real Petunia died sometime before Wilbur's birth, and Fritz replaced her with a puppet.
- Alternatively, Petunia was once human, but after giving birth to Laszlo and Tallulah she turned into a puppet. Somehow. The future is weird.
- Slightly less weird possibility: The kids are adopted. Especially considering that the future Robinsons almost adopt Lewis and apparently could be persuaded to adopt Yagoobian.
- Considering the scene where we meet her, it's possible Petunia fully exists and is alive, but when people besides Frtiz are concerned, her husband speaks for her as a puppet because she prefers to keep to herself. She's notably able to drive a car so it's likely she actually exists.
She had a rather conservative father, and was not supposed to be seeing any boy at all, let alone sleeping with her boyfriend. But she got unlucky. Although she managed to Hide Her Pregnancy (can't have been easy—she looked pretty slender), she and her boyfriend knew they had to do something with the baby. They did research into safe haven laws, found out that the orphanage was an appropriate place, and left him there. She was just young enough to think the whole Doorstop Baby scenario—in the rain—might fit, and she couldn't risk being noticed by someone who might try to talk with her father.
- Maybe she was a single mother too poor to take care of the baby and/or she lived in terrible conditions and wanted a better future for the baby. Or she was a single mother who had a terminal condition and knew no one to care for the baby and didn't want to die with the baby in her possession. Or she was a married mother who lost her husband and didn't want her child to be fatherless but she couldn't find a suitable mate. Or in a variation of the death thing maybe she was in danger, like the Mafia or someone was trying to get her and they already got her husband and of course she didn't want the baby to be in danger or maybe even worst the baby be left alone so the only thing she had to do was leave the child at the orphanage. There's so many other circumstances that aren't as "controversial" or fit for a teen movie or some Lifetime movie where the bad guys are made to look like the the good guy. Remember, this is a darn kids movie...
- She could've just been a jerk and Lewis is better off without her. He may have gotten lucky that she put in enough effort to abandon him at an orphanage- otherwise, who knows where she might have left him? But I guess we'll never know because Keep Moving Forward.
- Maybe the woman who dropped him off at the orphanage wasn't his mother at all. She could have been his big sister who was unequipped to care for him after their parents died, or who'd grown up suffering their cruel parents' abuse and didn't want her little brother to face the same misery.
- Apparently they originally planned to have Lewis use the memory scanner but cut it off before he sees his mother’s face. He was in a crib at the time. So my guess is she was either meant to be a young mom (but the conservative parents bit didn’t play in) or less so, she was a poor mom. Or both. It’s possible she gave the baby up because she was too young to know how to be a mother. It also... could simply be she was in an abusive relationship and this was the only way she could protect her child.
He is a bullfrog, and nobody understands a single word he says, but always had some mighty fine wine.
- Somewhat confirmed. "So I turn to the bullfrog, and ya know what I says? I says 'Hey, not with my umbrella you don't.'"
One of Franny's singing frogs + time machine + strict instructions on when to sing and when to act just like a regular frog = Generations of Hilarity Ensues. At least from the prankster's (possibly Wilbur) point of view.
The original timeline was created without time travel. When time travel is used and Lewis sees his future inventions, the timeline falls back on itself.
- Impossible. Cornelius knew he would not see his mother.
- Maybe the first time around he didn't see her for a different reason, like Wilbur opting not to bring him there.
- Lewis asks if they ever meet their birth mother. Cornelius says he should find out for himself. He might have realized this Lewis's experience would be different from his own. Cornelius' memory machine worked the first time. He did see his mother, and it was hard but he came to terms with being abandoned and accepted the Robinsons as his parents.
- If we go off what happened in deleted concepts, he never sees her. He decides he doesn’t need to before her face comes into full view. Cornelius maybe became afraid of seeing her last minute.
Cornelius' time machines are commercialized, but strict regulations must be placed on their use due to the possibility of abuse and/or inadvertently altering the timeline for the worse (as we know from the movie, changing the past with time travel is an easy thing). The government of the future sets up a real Time Police department. Wilbur actually ends up joining them, making his initial self-introduction to Lewis partly true From a Certain Point of View.
- Also, shortly after the movie, as one of the first time travellers (and now fully aware of how dangerous changing time can be), Wilbur gets a job there.
And strengthening the above theory, the Time Continuum Task Force could be the "extended" name of the Time Force Police.
Specifically, there is a Tom Selleck in the future who resembles Lewis. He was the one Wilbur was referring to, assuming Lewis would know who he was.
- Maybe Wilbur really meant his father sounds like Tom Selleck because Lewis asked what he looked like and of course Wilbur couldn't say "You!", so he told a lie with some truth to it that fit the moment and said he looks like Tom Selleck. And maybe Wilbur learned about Tom Selleck in History class, who knows, maybe in the future they'll have a "Hollywood History" class in presumably Middle School, if that type of school still exists.
- Actually, this troper just found out that that bit is explained in the DVD commentary. I can't write it word for word (my memory's like a goldfish's), so if you have the DVD, listen to the commentary and find out why Wilbur mentioned Tom Selleck. And if you don't have it...buy it.
- I think what they say in the DVD commentary is that Wilbur said Tom Selleck to throw him off because he looks pretty much the opposite of what Lewis looks like. Later on they decided it would be fun to get Tom Selleck to voice Cornelius because they had that joke in there already.
My husband and I both just watched this for the second or third time, and noticed his mom is dropping him off in red high heels. Or they look like red high heels. Dropping a newborn off in the middle of the night, completely covered up, and extremely nervous, plus the inappropiate shoeware for a watery ninja baby drop....
- I kind of agree with this, in a way. I did thought that there was something off about her when I saw those shoes of hers. And I thought she was some sort "lady of the evening" and she already had enough problems with her life (whatever that may be, is anyone's guess), let alone take care of a child [she accidentally had while doing her, ahem, job] so she had no choice but to abandon him.
And he's his own grandfather. Some time after the events of the film, Franny and Cornelius have another baby but can't keep it for some reason. Franny says she's going to put it up for adoption and Cornelius goes along with it, since he was adopted and turned out pretty well. Franny decides she could never live with wondering if some child walking down the street was the child she gave up. She reasons that if she brings the child to the past, he'll be an adult by the time she encounters him after having made the decision and it'll be easier then, so she secretly borrows one of the machines. Knowing the approximate time Cornelius was adopted (but not which orphanage he came from), she reasons there's a better chance of the baby getting adopted at that point, travels back to then and chooses what looks like the best (or at least, most convenient- it is raining, after all) orphange she can find. All this from the fact that the studio used Franny's basic character model and put a cloak on it to create Lewis's mom.
- If this is true, then after a few cycles Lewis would have some extreme genetic disorders...
However, Astro Boy takes place decades, or even a century or two, later. In this time, the time machines Cornelius invented were destroyed in some manner, and his company gets a name change through financial takeover or gets overshadowed by another company headed by a brilliant Gadgeteer Genius.
Wilbur wears a black tee-shirt with the lightning-on-blue-circle emblem of Captain Time Travel. That superhero was on the lunchbox that Lewis used to house his brain scanner controls. Why would a rebellious teenager wear a shirt inspired by a character that was popular in his father's youth? Perhaps when Wilbur grew up he was allowed to use the time machine, and he went back to the old days to become a superhero for a while.
- Bud is the adoptive father of Lewis. Would that make them related, in a way?
- Alternatively, Franny (along with Gaston and Art) could be related to Billie, since all four have the cowlick and are related by marriage.
- Jossed. Fran's maiden name is Framagucchi. It's possible that her family simply has a cowlick trait of its own.
- When the Ripple Effect happens around Lewis, the first time machine is intact, rendering it immune to time-alterations (and since Lewis is from the past, nothing happens to him, likely Wilbur ensuring if he's Ret-Gone, Lewis will take his place to Set Right What Once Went Wrong). The second time machine is left in the present in its invisible state, but if left abandoned, it dissolves into Cessation of Existence.
It's possible the reason she looks so feminine is because of future technology that can change a person's appearance more drastically. Unfortunately, it can't change a person's voice, and she probably had to go for good-old-fashioned voice training.
