Pretty soon the house is on fire, Ben's father (Jack Warden) is being driven off in an ambulance, and the family cat is bandaged up like a mummy. Ben wants a son to go camping with, to take to the ballpark, and when Junior is offered by the adoption agent (played with sniveling glee by Gilbert Gottfried), he jumps at the chance. Ben Healy (John Ritter), who's a sweater-under-the-sport-coat kind of guy, has baby lust in the worst way, but Flo (Amy Yasbeck) has "mechanical problems," or so the doctor tells them. Only a poor unsuspecting couple so desperate for a kid, and in such a hurry to get one that they'd accept anything, would take him.
Thirty times he's been tossed back into the adoption pond until he ends up with the nuns. He was left on a doorstep as an infant on a dark and stormy night, and since then he's been shuttled from one home to another. In Dennis Dugan's intermittently hilarious "Problem Child," he makes Dennis the Menace look like Mister Rogers - he's Dennis the Terminator. His name is Junior, he's 7, and nobody wants him. When he gets a single in his Little League game, he stretches it into a home run. The vacuum hose in the goldfish bowl.Įyeing a nun at the adoption home where he lives, he says, "I wonder if penguins can fly," and moments later, he has her swinging from a rope outside the classroom window. He puts laundry detergent in the kitty dish.