Finally, Junior displays his method for winning in a Little League baseball game, which involves hitting rival players in the crotch with his bat.
While Ben initially sees this as good riddance to browbeating Flo and trouble-making Junior, he soon notices signs that Junior is not the monster he appeared to be; through a series of pictures he drew, he depicts children and adults who treated him poorly as deformed monsters with hostile surroundings, but depicted Ben as a person in a pleasant background, revealing that he did value him as a father figure.
Realizing that Junior's behavior was simply a reaction to how he was treated as a child, and he merely had the misfortune of dealing with too many selfish narcissists from a young age, Ben undertakes a rescue mission to get him back from Beck.
Junior then removes his bow tie and throws it over the bridge as a symbol of rejecting his relationship with Beck (and realizing he'd been viewing the wrong person as a role model), and walks away with Ben.
[2] Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Richard Dreyfuss, Steve Martin, Rick Moranis, and Kurt Russell were considered for the role of Ben before it was turned over to John Ritter.
Mom, Kindergarten Cop, and Three Men and a Baby, but the studio insisted upon turning it into a children's film, a conversion that necessitated numerous reshoots and rewrites, leading to a difficult production that left all involved disappointed and anticipating a box office failure.
Looking back, they still feel it's "a mess" but take some pride in being involved with one of the "very few [PG-rated] children's films that black and that crazy", citing the scene where Flo commits adultery with Martin while Ben is catatonic and contemplating murdering Junior in the next room as an example.
The studio forced two weeks of reshoots, including a retooled ending and the addition of key scenes, such as Lucy's birthday party.
The site's critical consensus reads: "Mean-spirited and hopelessly short on comic invention, Problem Child is a particularly unpleasant comedy, one that's loaded with manic scenery chewing and juvenile pranks".
[15] Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave it a grade "A−" on scale of A to F.[16] The film was heavily censored when shown on television due to the remarks characters made about adoption, which critics saw as insensitive.
[17] Hal Hinson, writing for The Washington Post: Dugan has a brisk, imaginative comic style; he sets up his gags well so that there are still some surprises in the punch lines when they come.
It's basically about tearing stuff up, and after a while, you grow tired of seeing variations on the same joke of a cute kid committing horrible atrocities.
The protests sparked the inspiration for the sequel, this time with a poster of John Ritter inside a dryer looking out, while Fuzzball stands by it.
For the film (as well as The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and Look Who's Talking Too), Gilbert Gottfried was nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actor, but lost to Donald Trump in Ghosts Can't Do It.
[20] The VHS version adds an extra bit just before the closing credits, in which Junior interrupts the sequence to tell the audience that he'll be back next summer for Problem Child 2.
[23] The film first aired on NBC on September 15, 1991,[24] with 12 minutes of previously deleted scenes and all the profanity was dubbed with different and appropriate words and phrases.
The film was featured in a famous scene from Martin Scorsese's 1991 remake of Cape Fear, where it is shown screening at a movie theatre attended by ex-convict Max Cady (Robert De Niro), attorney Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) and the latter's family.
[26] In 1995, a Turkish-language adaptation of the film was made called Zıpçıktı, which was directed by Ünal Küpeli and featured Şenol Coşkun in the lead role.