YMMV / Baby Geniuses

• Bile Fascination: Most people who watch these movies do so because of the negative reception they have gotten.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: A comparatively benign example but still present. Presuming the "Kinder Method" does result in the children proving more intelligent as they grow older and their early education by BabyCo begins to manifest, then in about five years Sly will start to prove himself demonstrably smarter than Whit, vindicating everything Elena has done. The Info Dump in the opening scenes even states this is exactly what will happen.
• Fridge Logic:
  • Why, exactly, does BabyCo need a secret lab beneath the city? Aside from the obvious question of how a child care company has the resources to make such a thing, from what we see they aren't doing anything illegal, or even really amoral. Their experiments seem to amount to monitoring the babies in controlled environments, analyzing what they do at play in greater depth, and keeping them isolated from the outside world, and their purpose in doing this is to prove that educating the babies in their early years will cause them to have superior intelligence as they grow older. And aside from keeping the kids contained in the lab, they don't seem to be mistreated and are actually well taken care of. There's no reason they couldn't just use the children of company employees and ask them to live at the office to keep the kids contained. Why is this some sort of secret conspiracy?
  • The babies are geniuses and apparently have the muscle mass and dexterity to manipulate, perform martial arts, and build electronic devices. Yet they do not seem to be potty trained, since BabyCo has a diaper disposal service.
• Nightmare Fuel: The animatronic mascots. Including a Monster Clown with a tray of wind-up dentures, and a monstrous giant shaped like a baby, with the voice of Satan himself. That's to say nothing of how the first film's shoddy attempts to composite a toddler's head over the face of their stunt doubles. Even the way their mouths move is unnerving. This might have been the Intended Audience Reaction however.
• Retroactive Recognition: Justin Chatwin in Baby Geniuses 2.
• Sequelitis: The second film performed worse than the first both critically and financially, and is considered one of the worst movies ever made. To add insult to injury, the direct-to-video series has continued in spite of the poor reputation of both films.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The special effects for the films are terrible. First, there's the method of making the babies' antics look convincing, by poorly Photoshopping baby faces over the bodies of little people (especially obvious during the dance scene), in addition to the disturbing Synchro-Vox-esque process used to superimpose CGI lipsync onto the babies faces. Also, one scene in which Sly backflips several times in front of the parents of his identical twin brother, you can easily tell it's a little person stuntman because of the height difference.
  • While they do pass them off as robots in the film, the performances and costume work for the animatronic characters are very low budget, even by the movie's standards (and betraying the fact that these are supposed to be multi-million dollar robots). Baby Bunting in particular dips into the Unintentional Uncanny Valley with the weightless movements of his suit performer and inexpressive, borderline inoperable face.
  • In Baby Geniuses 2 in particular, Kahuna has some stunts where it's very obvious he's on a wire and/or replaced with a stunt double.
• Spiritual Adaptation: The films can be considered the closest thing to a live-action adaptation of Rugrats.
• Squick: Bill Biscane of the sequel is revealed to be the MUCH older brother of the forever young Kahuna. It Makes Just as Much Sense in Context.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: As bad as the second film is considered to be, it at least features a pretty imaginative story.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: Jon Voight in the sequel. One could've easily thought that he would just go Ham and Cheese in this kind of film, but he's the only one not delivering his lines in monotone and attempted to make his character actually expressive. Considering that Voight was an executive producer for the first film and kept playing roles in all the direct-to-video sequels, he seems to have an odd amount of faith in the franchise.
• Uncertain Audience: One has to wonder what audience a film series such as this was meant for. It's simply too juvenile for adults, and far too dull and stupid for most kids, who didn't relate to the "talking" toddlers onscreen because of their unconvincing behaviour. The first film also features a weirdly large amount of Demographically Inappropriate Humor, such as sexual innuendos and mild swearing, such that it was actually rated PG (and this was in a time where the PG rating wasn't as toothless—for comparison, Mulan was rated G the prior year).

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