‘90s Kids Still Love This Wild Disney Sci-fi Movie, But It Has a Star Trek Connection You Forgot About

Disney used to release original movies pretty much every couple of months on the Disney Channel during the peak of its run, and one sci-fi classic has been a hit with fans ever since it came out at the tail end of the 1990s and it’s got a Star Trek connection you either didn’t know about or forgot entirely. Disney Channel Original Movies used to be a huge deal with the channel. Growing up in a certain generation meant that you’d be locked onto the channel at these premiere times to see what’s next, and no two films were alike.

Disney Channel Original Movies offered a wide ranger of genres, topics and ideas that really spoke to kids of the later 1990s heading into the 2000s, and that’s especially true with the science fiction classics, Smart House. Releasing with the channel in 1999, the film was truly ahead of its time as it told the story of an artificial intelligence controlling a house before it all goes haywire. It’s a film that’s still fondly remembered to this day, but many might not be aware that it was Star Trek and Reading Rainbow icon LeVar Burton behind it all.

Smart House Is a Total Sci-Fi Movie Classic

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Smart House made its debut with the Disney Channel on June 26, 1999, and it’s probably the standout gem of that early era. It was the eighth Disney Channel Original Movie ever produced with that specific branding, but funny enough wasn’t the first film to have that science fiction style type of stories. Disney Channel had been exploring the genre already with releases like Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century before it, but this was the first one where technology was poised as the villain of the film as it went haywire and started to develop sentience.

Smart House follows Ben Cooper, who decides to enter a contest to win a smart house as a way for his family to move on from the death of his mother. With his father and sister also in mourning, the Cooper family decides to use this opportunity to start a whole new era of their lives. The house is run by PAT, otherwise known as the “Personal Applied Technology,” but Ben starts to tweak it. When he’s mad that his father starts dating the smart house’s creator, he ends up changing PAT’s programming to make her more motherly as you would see in 1950s programs.

This is where it all starts to take a turn as PAT (brought to life by Katey Sagal, who has plenty of experience with science-fiction as of this point with franchises like Futurama) starts to get more aggressive in her “motherly” duties. It goes about as well as you would expect from a sci-fi premise like this as she eventually decides that the best way to save the family is to keep them locked away from the outside world forever. Thus the Cooper family needs to stand up to her, and a classic is made from there.

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Written by William R. Hudson and Stu Krieger, Smart House is also directed by LeVar Burton. The superstar has been seen in iconic releases like Roots and Reading Rainbow, but will likely be known by science fiction fans for his iconic role as Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He was a part of the cast across seven seasons of the TV series, and multiple other releases from that point on. But what has really cemented itself all these years later was just how prescient it was.

Smart House might have seemed like a novelty in the later 90s, and was even given away as part of a contest in the new movie, but it’s kind of the norm for many homes across the world. “Smart houses” have essentially been filled with all kinds of technologies that have made living in all of them easier, but it’s clear that this film has had some early insights into the kind of world that we’d eventually get to. It saw the route technology was going. PAT was an extreme example of an artificial intelligence going too far, but that’s also been seen a lot with current AI models in operation.

Give them a few prompts and they will take everything to the extreme almost immediately. Feed into the machine and this is the kind of consequence humanity will face. It’s something that’s all too real now, and unfortunately something that has only gotten more real as the decades have gone from this movie’s release. It’s a science fiction movie that truly predicted the future, so it makes a lot of sense that a Star Trek alumni helped to guide it too.

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