The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl
A lonely kid's imaginary superheroes turn out to be real, and off he goes to Planet Drool in smeary red-and-blue 3-D. Nobody who was a child in 2005 forgot the dream song, the Land of Milk and Cookies, or a pre-Twilight Taylor Lautner scowling in a shark suit.
Robert Rodriguez followed his Spy Kids run with a superhero movie sourced from the best possible screenwriter: his own child. The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, released June 10, 2005, carries the onscreen credit "Based on the stories and dreams of Racer Max" — Rodriguez's young son, whose inventions (a boy raised by sharks, a girl made of lava, a planet built from dreams) the director filmed more or less as delivered. Taylor Lautner, the first actor to audition for Sharkboy, was cast immediately and choreographed his own martial-arts moves; Taylor Dooley glowed as Lavagirl, Cayden Boyd played the daydreaming Max, and George Lopez hammed through multiple roles including the villainous Mr. Electric.
Like Spy Kids 3-D before it, the movie shipped in anaglyph 3-D — the paper glasses with one red and one blue lens — which critics blamed for its murky look. Reviews were brutal (19% on Rotten Tomatoes, with Roger Ebert docking it for the 3-D process itself), but kids didn't read reviews: it took in $72 million worldwide, and its dream logic, cardboard-surreal sets and earnestly awful lullaby scene — Sharkboy thrashing through a song to put Max to sleep — burned themselves into a generation's memory.
The internet did the rest. Lautner's Twilight fame turned his shark-suit past into beloved trivia, the dream song became a meme, and the film's cult status ran deep enough that Rodriguez brought the characters back for Netflix's We Can Be Heroes in 2020 — a straight-faced sequel to a movie the critics had left for dead fifteen years earlier.
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