by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

The DCOM Pantheon #5: Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century (dir. Kenneth Johnson, January 23, 1999)

I don't watch SNL, but last weekend's show featured a quick bit about Brink!, where the joke was "Remember Brink!?" And I do! In the sketch, part of Weekend Update, a cast member said he too remembered Brink! and Colin Jost made his "What if a personified yacht club was condescending to you because you tipped a waiter more than 5%?" face and the show went on and maybe they finally brought Pat back and she played "Hallelujah."

The crowd cheered for Brink!, of course. Disney Channel Original Movies are one of those universal points of reference for people born a generation before or after I was. Even if you haven't watched one since 2002, there are movie names, actors and plotlines that I could bring up and you'd instantly recognize. I could write "Cetus-Lupeedus" and feel fully confident that the kind of person who reads a website like this would know exactly what I was talking about. You could hear it in your head.

Cetus-Lupeedus was the rare (at least when I was a kid) Disney Channel catchphrase, but they milked it on a truly Kenan & Kel level. In my head, it was always "ceevis lapeevis," but the script said otherwise. It played like Omar's whistle on The Wire–the cetus-lupeedus promos would hit and you knew Zenon was coming.

Zenon was the star of Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century, a title that sounded futuristic in 1999 and became obsolete almost immediately. Zenon got the first DCOM sequel and was one of only four DCOMs to become part of a trilogy. It was Raven-Symoné's first project with Disney, a decades-long partnership that would lead to That's So Raven, Cheetah Girls and the currently-airing Raven's Home. It was a big deal that only got bigger in retrospect, to the point that SNL could have mentioned Zenon on Saturday and received at least as big of a reaction. And, in a common Behind the Music phoenix-from-the-ashes dramatic arc, it all started... with a rejection.

Zenon is based on a picture book and early reader series that had launched two years earlier. They're all out of print now, but its creators also made P.J. Funnybunny, which had a little more success as one of the weird books Dr. Seuss didn't write but which still carried the Cat in the Hat logo (see also: Go, Dog. Go!). Disney optioned Zenon for a TV series, shot a multi-episode pilot and then passed on the project. I can't find information on whether anything was changed between the pilot and the movie, but at some point Zenon was recontextualized as a DCOM. This raises the question of how many other DCOMs were failed pilots, and if the success of Zenon as a DCOM ever made executives consider going back on their initial decision to stop the Zenon show. It could be that Disney felt the material worked better as a movie or, more likely, they wanted to recoup what they had spent making the pilot and stumbled into a hit while airing what they had previously deemed subpar work.

However it went down, Zenon is a foundational DCOM. It's a sci-fi fish-out-of-water story about a tween just trying to get through this crazy thing called life. The year is 2049 and Zenon Kar has lived with her scientist parents on a space station since she was five and doesn't have any desire to return to Earth. "Everything down there is motivated by money," one of Zenon's friends muses during a typical post-school Earth bashing. Zenon disagrees: "Everything's motivated by self-defense." There are cars, disease and weather on Earth, and the tweens are too busy having college freshman "I simply cannot stand the bourgeoisie" conversations to recognize they spend all their time in an iMac floating through the void.

About that iMac-- the space station is run by billionaire tycoon Parker Wyndham, who, with his assistant Mr. Lutz, mulls over whether to shut the whole project down to save money. Lutz, played by Bob Bancroft, is an especially shifty character, all bug eyes and "I can make things very difficult for you, young lady" veiled threats. Zenon is Eloise in the Plaza Hotel, causing mischief while being so darn lovable you can't hold any of it against her. When she gets wind they're going to tear down her Plaza, she acts out and is sent to Earth to live with her aunt. The space station's commander is named Edward Plank, which is just a perfect. A+ "strict principal" name, and he won't let Zenon jeopardize this space home. Plank's played by Stuart Pankin, who also has a great "strict principal" name. Just before Zenon gets the boot, Wyndham pledges $500 million for upgrades and repairs to the space station. Maybe everything is fine!

Zenon's literally grounding is still in effect, though, and she's forced to jump on a ship to Earth. The flight from space to the planet takes about 30 seconds, from which we can infer the station is somewhere near Mars. She has trouble fitting in with the kids and then she fits in and then she gets a boyfriend.

I liked that the slang was different between Earth and the space station. Zenon's home has only been in orbit for less than ten years, but the vernacular has totally forked in that time. In space, the kids throw "major" and "minor" behind words, i.e. "Wyndham would have to be a scrooge major to shut us down!" The kids dream of "adult interference minor." At one point, Zenon says "You'd totally blow an o-ring if we had to return to Earth, right, Mom?" but maybe "blowing out an o-ring" didn't mean the same thing in 1999 that it does now. People include spacey words like "plunarious" whenever possible, which implies most of the slang we say is based on the things around us, which is hardly the cheesesteakin' case.

Earth, meanwhile, is 1999. People have hover boats and advanced cell phones, but everybody dresses and talks like they're in 1999. The single best piece of dialogue occurs between an Earth girl and Zenon. The Earth girl bullies Zenon minutes after the Earth landing:

Earth Girl: "Sorry if I'm interrupting, but my pack and I have a bet. They think that with those clothes and that 'do-- or should I say "don't"-- you must be from some viral extreme place like Eastern Jersey, but I think you were simply getting a six month headstart on Halloween."
Zenon: "You win. It's the Halloween thing! Now, lend me that mask you're wearing and I'll have the most hideous major costume ever."

The girl looks sincerely hurt by this, so good job, Zenon.

Over time, Zenon learns to fit in with the other kids and stops brutally destroying her peers' confidence, and she makes friends with some hackers. Greg, future love interest and floppy-haired cool kid, hears Zenon out about Wyndham and Lutz' weirdness, hacks into their servers and steals their financial information. Turns out Wyndham doesn't have the $500 million he promised to the space station. What's more, he's been taking out exorbitant amounts of insurance on the station. In the process of hacking an earring (an earring is hacked), the tweens find a virus. A little cartoon worm hatches out of an egg, bites a hole in the background...

... and blows a computer up from the inside.

Wyndham and Lutz are, I can't believe I'm writing this about a DCOM, planning to loose a virus on their own space station and blow it up with everybody on board so that they can collect the insurance money. This isn't that far from what people like Alex Jones think happened on 9/11. Maybe he got his false flag idea from Zenon. It'd be the least weird thing about him.

The crisis is averted with the help of boy band Microbe and their lead singer Proto Zoa. Micobe are a wonderful time capsule. Correct predictions of the future are fine, but I love sci-fi extrapolations based on what was popular the very moment a movie was filmed. Zenon's crew had to create the music of the future and they said "Okay, so O-Town?"

They have one song, "21st Century Girl," which deserves to have its lyrics printed out and painted on your walls. Here are the first three verses:

Stargazing megafast
You hit me like a cosmic blast
You've given me a Technicolor world

Putting me in Overdrive
Speed of light, I'm so alive!
Could you be my supernova girl?

Interplanetary, Megastellar, Hydrostatic
There's no gravity between us
Our love is automatic!

Greg picks Zenon over the bully from earlier in another dramatic scene that exists only to make us somehow feel bad for a brat. "Swallow the reality pill!" he yells at the bully. "Read my flapping lips: Zenon or no Zenon, I will never be your boyfriend." Harsh! May this tween one day find peace. I guess it's nice that Zenon is in love.

Cetus-Lupeedus Count: 5 (plus Zenon's mom says it once and a grown woman yells it in the background as the space station begins ripping itself apart)

Before they were big: Kirsten Storms, Zenon herself, has had a main role on General Hospital since 2005. That's 1,332 episodes. She was also on Days of our Lives for five years after the first Zenon aired. Zach Lipovsky, who plays minor friend Matt moved behind the camera as an adult and directed a Kim Possible DCOM in 2019.

Well after they were big: Raven-Symoné belongs here more than she does in the "before they were big" category because she had already been on The Cosby Show, in the post-Rudy cute kid role after Keshia Knight Pulliam grew to a decrepit 10 years old and couldn't play toddler anymore. Still, she'd have a bigger career at the Disney Channel going forward than she had on Cosby or Hangin' with Mr. Cooper. Edward Plank is played by Stuart Pankin, who starred as Earl on Dinosaurs, not that I could have recognized him. Director Kenneth Johnson created the sci-fi TV phenom V. He wrote and directed the original miniseries and helped write the other stuff. Gregory Smith, who plays Greg, starred in Small Soldiers, a movie I was obsessed with for a couple years despite not seeing it until later (the toys were very cool). I got him mixed up with Omri Katz (Eerie, Indiana and Hocus Pocus) a lot.

What I had remembered from childhood: The catchphrase. I hadn't even remembered that Raven was in this. But cetus-lupeedus is eternal.

The year is 1999: Zenon is obsessed with a boy band, Microbe, which is fronted by the hunky Proto Zoa. Microbe is a cross between *NSYNC and Sugar Ray, down to Proto Zoa's frosted tips.

The movie's conception of the Internet is also extremely of its time, which I love. When Zenon wants to find out about Microbe, she logs onto their heavily compressed website and there's been zero effort put into imagining what the Internet or computers will look like in the future.

Wouldn't fly today!: On that Chelsea Clinton reference-- I'm kind of surprised a Clinton shoutout, even to Chelsea, made it into Zenon, considering Bill was impeached in December 1998, one month before the movie premiered. I would have assumed Disney would cut anything that could make anybody think of a sex scandal.

And this could be more of a stretch, but the Wyndham/Lutz conspiracy to murder a bunch of their own people by blowing up a giant building could have been seen as a little much post-9/11 and all of its attendant truther theories.

The _____ was in your heart the whole time: protoplasmic music major (and desire to stop Space 9/11)

Ultimate Ranking:

Brink!
Halloweentown
Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century
Under Wraps
You Lucky Dog

Ultimate Ranking Notes: I remain impressed by how strong the DCOMs were out of the gate. I don't think we'll get a terrible one for another year or two.