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Diane Szalinski (née Murdock) is a character in the 1989 Disney live-action film, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, its 1992-1997 sequels, and its 1997-2000 television series. She was the wife of Wayne and the mother of Amy, Nick, and Adam.

Personality[]

Diane is intelligent, resourceful, level-headed, and she has a good sense of humor. She has a witty, sarcastic quip to bring Wayne back down to Earth when he unveils his absurd inventions. She is well-educated, and very bright. She is a wonderful mother to Amy and Nick, and a supportive, forgiving wife to Wayne. She is stubborn and determined-- she ran for school board president when she heard about problems at Amy's school.

Appearances[]

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids[]

Diane is a 39-year-old real estate agent who was said to have been having problems with her husband Wayne, so she spent the night at her mother's house. At the same time, Wayne was working on the experimental and somewhat non-operational shrinking machine. Diane sells a house before returning home and eventually discovers the kids are gone. Eventually, Wayne comes to her with the fact that the machine works, however unbeknownst to her at the time that the kids, as well as the Thompson ones, were shrunk.

Realizing that they are lost in the backyard, Diane decides to assist Wayne in repairing his machine. After finding poor Nick in Wayne's cereal, they discover the others and eventually get them up to the attic where they return them to normal size.

Honey, I Blew Up the Kid[]

Two years after the incident with Nick and Amy, the Szalinskis move to Nevada and have another child, Adam. Amy is going away to college and Diane accompanies her in order to get her settled in while leaving Wayne to take care of Nick and Adam while she's gone. She returns home early to find Adam's favorite toy, Big Bunny, overgrown in the house. Wayne tries avoiding a confrontation with her; however, when she sees Adam at an unnatural size, she faints. After coming to, she almost kills Wayne because of what happened and then assists both him and Nick into calming Adam down.

While Wayne is going through different solutions, he realizes the only way to reverse the process is his shrinking machine. Reluctantly leaving Adam in the capable hands of Nick, Diane accompanies Wayne to the Sterling Labs warehouse where they find the machine. She drives on the way home while Wayne works on rebuilding it on the road. Returning home, Diane finds that Nick and Adam, along with Nick's girlfriend and Adam's babysitter, Mandy Park, are gone. Meeting up with Wayne's boss, Clifford Sterling, and seeing Wayne's rival, Dr. Charles Hendrickson, being fired, they head toward Las Vegas where they try to stop Adam by using Big Bunny.

After Wayne uses the word "nap", Adam starts throwing a fit and ends up heading for Las Vegas. Diane drives most of the way and assists in trying to stop him from causing any unwanted destruction in getting there. She and the others manage to stop an ice cream truck, which Marshal Preston Brooks uses to lure Adam out of the city, however, Adam manages to grab the giant ice cream bar off the top of the truck and bite a chunk out of it. Eventually, Diane comes up with the idea to enlarge herself and keep Adam still while Wayne shrinks them back to normal size. When noticing the helicopter carrying Dr. Hendrickson, she says to Wayne "Wayne, time to get large". Reluctantly, he uses his machine in order to enlarge her size to over 250 feet tall and weight to a whooping 5600 tons (11 million pounds)!

While Dr. Hendrickson shoots his tranquilizer cannon on Adam twice, he makes him cry, and as a result, Diane grabs hold of the helicopter and says "Back off!". While she puts it on the ground, Adam runs to her with open arms and she holds him tight while Nick and Mandy are being squeezed against their giant mother's breast. Wayne shrinks them back to normal size. Dr. Hendrickson arrives at the scene and congratulates Wayne for getting Adam back to normal size. Diane confronts Dr. Hendrickson about him shooting at Adam with "some sort of rifle," to which he says, "They were tranquilizer cartridges. They wouldn't have hurt him, I assure you." She pretends to buy it before turning back to Dr. Hendrickson and angrily punches him in the face, knocking him out cold.

She was last seen assisting Wayne offscreen in locating Nick and Mandy due to the fact that they were stuck in Adam's pocket, and therefore were shrunk by accident once she and Adam went back to normal size. She asks if they are okay, to which Wayne confirms. After the state trooper asks about the gigantic Big Bunny, the couple consults with one another on shrinking Adam's stuffed animal as they kiss in the wake of dawn as the credits roll.

Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves[]

After the incident with Adam, the Szalinskis have moved again and this time they live closer to Diane's brother-in-law, Gordon Szalinski, his wife, Patti, and their two kids, Jenny and Mitch. Before leaving on a two-day vacation with Patti, Diane leaves a list of instructions for Wayne and Gordon to follow. One such rule is for Wayne to get rid of his Tiki Man statue. Eventually, when they leave, Patti forgets to leave Mitch's medicine and as a result they have to go back.

After bringing Mitch's medicine to the house, Diane and Patti are about to leave when they hear the shrinking machine getting fired up in the attic. Upon entering, they find it on and no operators, however, that's until they go to leave and they're accidentally shrunk like their husbands. She gets angry due to the fact that she is smaller than a raisin and that she isn't even on vacation due to being shrunk. Eventually exiting the attic via a fishing reel, they end up in Adam's room where they discuss a plan to get their kids' attention via the stereo's speakers. Agreeing with it, they hitch a ride on Adam's Shark Cruiser Hot Wheels car which sends them falling down the laundry chute. They are then brought back upstairs right where they started and end up having to brave a cockroach in order to get to Jenny's friend Holly's bubble machine, which she brought for the party.

Diane and Patti end up in the kitchen where they encounter a Daddy Long Legs caught in cobwebs. While Patti cuts him free, Diane distracts him and they eventually hitch a ride on him as he crawls up on the counter. Eventually, Mitch becomes ill from potassium deficiency, and despite their attempts to get his medicine in his visual range, they decide to shout to get his attention. They succeed in doing so, but he faints and as a result, Jenny and Adam attempt to revive him. After they do so with bananas, he gets up, then Adam and Jenny go to investigate a disturbance in the living room. Eventually, Jenny and Mitch go to find Diane and Patti in order to bring them up to the attic where they're returned to normal size. After the events of them being shrunk, they return home after picking up Adam at baseball camp.

Shrunk[]

This film establishes that Diane has died sometime after the events of Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves.

Disney parks[]

Honey, I Shrunk The Audience[]

As Nick is accidentally shrunken to a mere 5 inches along with the whole audience, trouble soon ensues as an unaware 44-year-old towering Diane wearing a fringe blond hair, baggy beige suit, silk neck scarf is summoned back from her lawyer job and nearly trampled over a newly shrunken Nick under her fabric business loafers as she walked by him in Wayne's lab which is set as a stage for the viewers and after he quickly leaves the room before telling her that he shrunk the audience. Diane furiously says "You What!?" and drops a hands-free helmet with binoculars causing it to thud.

The concerned Diane then asks where Nick is until the shrunken Nick calls for her and alerts his position to her. The viewers are then intimidated by Wayne's incredibly worried and clumsy wife, which tricked Nick and the audience into believing being in comfort and care with the gentle blonde haired mother. Which changed soon after, as she gasps loudly, the ground starts booming and shaking under her every footstep and becoming progressively louder as she frantically walks closer to take a better look down at her tiny son. Also, her baggy suit pants sway and rustle violently in a rhythmic way from the impact of her stomps.

She stands at a bend over position grasping her knees tightly in front of him, her eyes filled with terror and her mouth dropped open out of shock, proceeds to quitely stare at her shrunken son as she struggles to grasp the reality of the situation. Everything about Diane's appearance upclose seems more scarily massive as she's bended over up close, from her gigantic staring face, breathing, every pore and blemish beingnoticeable on her skin, fringe blond hair, baggy beige suit, dangling silk neck scarf and even the loud rustling of her baggy pants gives such behemoth of a woman an aura of a weighty and Giant appearance. Also, Diane's body appeared significantly thick in width compared to her son. Diane is a great risk to her son, let alone with her standing close to him bent over and looming over him.

As to her shrunken son's point of view, Diane Szalinski appeared as a force of nature with thick and heavy physique proportions. Diane was already quite a tall woman of 5 feet, 10 inches, but from shrunken Nick's perspective her height is nearly 30 feet tall!, her width is 12.5 feet and her body gigantically weighs a very hefty 21.6 tons (43200 pounds), which is nearly 300 times more than her original weight of 143 pounds and is 10 times thicker than Nick. Which transformed the caring mom's body into a giant crushing hazard of dense meat than the body being a place of love and embrace of a mother.

Nick along with the audience could exactly feel the heaviness by just looking at the giant physique of the giant mother. Nick acting like his mother doesn't weigh 330 times heavier than him begins asking for help from his already petrified giant mother in finding his pet snake. Nick looked pathetic as he appeared a mere alive toy figure alerting and asking his giant mother for help despite knowing the danger of being crushed under her if she got too close. But his request gets disregarded by the towering mother as she appears in shock at the sight of her mere inches tall son which made her become woozy upon the thought of her fragile son's safety.

Diane knew that if she even wanted to hug her tiny son then he will be squeezed to death brutally against her breast and would be sticking off her body like a bug as she would be too big and overwhelmingly heavy to be touching a shrunken Nick. When she regains her focus and arrives back to reality, her legs start shaking then suddenly the mother begins to lose her balance, her moans sounds extremely loud from Nick's view as she reaches the beginning of her fainting state in front of Nick.

Unfortunately, Diane's terrifying fainting giant body begins falling directly towards Nick who luckily dodged into being nearly crushed to a pulp and becoming a stain under Diane's expensive beige suit as her heavy body collapsed just beside him. The impact of her sudden fall on the floor caused the ground to shake violently due to the impact of Diane's enormous size and mass from the point of view of the shrunken Nick and the audience (This triggered the seats to jerk as well which really simulates being small and how heavy Diane really is compared to the audience. Diane's finger began twitching out of the screen as she laid unconscious on the floor and her giant finger was barely away from rubbing and tearing off the audience's faces). Soon after, Dr. Channing appears to make sure that no one from the audience members is stuck or crushed under the heaviness of Diane's collapsed giant body and after finding out that thankfully she hasn't landed on anybody, proceeds to order Wayne's team to quickly carry her away from the stage to her safety. Nick scared for his life from Diane falling onto him again and flattening him as they carry her over him, begs them not to drop her once more. After she regained consciousness, she was seen reprimanding Adam for taking the theatre containing Nick and the audience fearing for their safety. She and Dr. Channing manage to persuade Adam to put the theatre back where he found it.

Near the end, the floor begins shaking as Diane appears yet again with her final appearance to help Nick feel at peace as she crawls on her knees towards her son without crushing him and jokingly says if these incidents relevant to shrinking keep occurring, then no one is going to invite the Szalinski family anywhere to lighten his mood. Nick, who is getting more anxious due to his giant clumsy mother being way too close to him again proceeds to yell that his dad needs to hurry up before he is swept away by the Disney people or getting crushed for real under his clumsy mother. Diane says "Okay." in an assured tone. Wayne announces the machine is ready which made Diane to walk far away from Nick to avoid further mistakes on her behalf of accidentally crushing her shrunken son under her weight again due to her own clumsiness.

Trivia[]

  • Diane's death in Shrunk is very likely out of respect of Marcia Strassman, who originally played the character in the first two films, who had died in 2014.
  • She is always good and a protagonist, but she at times can be an antagonist as a giant or against shrunken people.
  • A running gag throughout the films was that Diane would faint upon realizing the current situation.
  • A giant version of Diane's iconic faint was also included in her appearance in the theme park attraction Honey, I Shrunk the Audience. It showed the most destructive faint in entertainment history, as Diane nearly crushed a shrunken Nick under her heavy body as she fainted onto him and collapsed just beside him, which caused the ground to shake violently under the impact of the giant woman's fall. It was the only time Diane's faint was used in a manner of an dangerous obstacle against a shrunken person and not as a running gag due to her being giant sized and the risk of crushing someone under her was high if she faints as a giant.
  • The point of view from a shrunken Nick and the audience of his mother Diane Szalinski's height increases from 5 feet 10 inches to be at least 30 feet tall, 12.5 feet wide and her body weighs a very hefty 21.6 tons (43,000 pounds) compared to her original weight of 143 pounds. In Honey, I Blew Up the Kid when she became a Giant, she grew up to a colossal 250 feet tall and weighed a whooping 5600 tons (11 million pounds).
  • The platform in Honey, I Shrunk the Audience were installed with vibrations to simulate loud and violent ground shakes (When Diane Szalinski's fainting heavy body collapsed on the floor).

Gallery[]


v - e - d
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids Logo
Media
Honey, I Shrunk the KidsHoney, I Blew Up the KidHoney, We Shrunk OurselvesShrunkHoney, I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show (episode list)
Disney Parks
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: Movie Set AdventureHoney, I Shrunk the Audience
Characters
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: Wayne SzalinskiDiane SzalinskiAmy SzalinskiNick SzalinskiQuarkRuss Thompson, Sr.Mae ThompsonRuss Thompson, Jr.Ron ThompsonDr. BrainardProfessor FredericksonAntieThe ScorpionTommy PervisDon ForresterGloria Forrester
Honey, I Blew Up the Kid: Adam SzalinskiDr. Charles HendricksonClifford SterlingMandy Park
Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves: Gordon SzalinskiPatti SzalinskiJenny SzalinskiMitch SzalinskiRicky King
Honey, I Shrunk the Audience: Gigabyte
Locations
CaliforniaNevadaColorado
See Also
Szalinzki's Shrinking MachineSzalinski's Growing MachineSzalinzki's Shrinking Machine 2.0
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