Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century
Kirsten Storms as Zenon Kar, a 13-year-old exiled from her orbiting space station to boring old Earth in the year 2049, where nobody gets her slang and she has to stop a plot to crash the station for the insurance money. Disney Channel premiered it on January 23, 1999, and "zetus lapetus" entered the vocabulary of every kid watching. It was the first Disney Channel Original Movie to get a sequel.
Zenon began as a 1996 picture book written by Marilyn Sadler and illustrated by Roger Bollen, and Disney Channel's film version was originally conceived as a pilot for a television series that never happened. Kenneth Johnson directed it for de Passe Entertainment, with Suzanne de Passe and Suzanne Coston as executive producers; filming began in August 1998 in Vancouver, where the Plaza of Nations stood in for the rocket launch yard. The premiere was slated for December 1998 and slipped to January 23, 1999.
The year is 2049. Zenon Kar lives with her family on an Earth-orbiting space station, gets in trouble with Commander Edward Plank, and is punished by being sent down to Earth to live with her Aunt Judy. The kids there find her name, her stories and her slang weird, and she finds them hopelessly behind on pop culture, though she makes friends with Andrew and Greg. From the ground she uncovers a scheme by station bigwig Parker Wyndham to crash the station with a computer virus and collect the insurance, and nobody believes her: Plank convinces her parents it is a ploy to get back up for a concert by her idol, Proto Zoa, and his pop-rock group Microbe. Andrew writes an antivirus, Proto Zoa recognizes Zenon from a "Dance with Proto Zoa" contest and gets her onto the rocket, and she loads the disk in time. Kirsten Storms played Zenon, Raven-Symoné her friend Nebula Wade, Stuart Pankin the commander, Phillip Rhys the pop star and Gregory Smith the love interest.
The slang is what stuck. Fans have spelled Zenon's all-purpose exclamation "zetus lapetus" for decades, but when BuzzFeed obtained an official copy of the script from Disney in 2016, the spelling was "Cetus-Lupeedus," which points at the sky: Cetus is one of the largest constellations, and Iapetus is Saturn's third-largest moon. The article concluded that "we may never know the ~truth~ behind the catchphrase."
Zenon was the first film under the Disney Channel Original Movie banner to produce a sequel, Zenon: The Zequel, in 2001, and a third, Zenon: Z3, closed the run in 2004. Walt Disney Home Video put the original on VHS in September 2000, and it now sits on Disney+, its catchphrase spelled one way in the script and said however you remember it.
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