Zenon
A Disney Channel movie first aired in 1999, Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century is set in 2049 AD, where Zenon Kar (Kirsten Storms) is a 13-year old who literally gets grounded as she is forced to leave her Space Station home and live on Earth.
Although it never became a series as expected, it did spawn two Made-for-TV sequels.
Tropes used in Zenon include:
- Adults Are Useless: Played straight and then subverted. Zenon's suspicions about Wyndham and Lutz fall on the deaf ears of her parents and Commander Plank. The subversion is that after Zenon tells Mark and Astrid about the virus on the space station, they believe her (somewhat), but they cannot figure out the problem.
- Almost Kiss: Zenon and Greg are sitting side-by-side, facing the same direction, with awkward silence. Zenon tells Greg if he wants to kiss her he should get over it and just kiss her. After a pause, they both turn towards each other at the same time - and accidentally smash their faces into each other.
- Artificial Gravity
- Beauty Equals Goodness: In the sequel that introduces aliens, Zenon deduces that the aliens are good, with no irony, because their spaceship is too beautiful for them to be evil (it looked like a rainbow butterfly thing). She was right of course.
- Bigger on the Inside: The station.
- British Rock Star: Protozoa.
- Catch Phrase: "Zetus Lupetis!"
- Colorful Song: "Super Nova Girl", "The Galaxy is Ours".
- Computer Virus: How the villains of the first movie commit their Insurance Fraud scheme. Solved by Hollywood Hacking and reverse engineering.
- Dramatic Alien VTOL: The aliens in the second movie have a very pretty space ship.
- Energy Beings: The aliens in the second movie, more or less.
- Future Music: The movie focused heavily on the music of a band called Microbe. This being a 1999 Disney Channel movie, their biggest song sounds exactly like modern light tween pop, except with lyrics such as -- sing along, contemporaries, you know the words -- "ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM, make my heart go BOOM BOOM, would you be my Super Nova Girl?"
- Future Slang: A particularly memorable example. Cetus lapetus, guys! The movie is totally lunar!
- Not to mention an entire song whose lyrics include nothing but future slang (i.e. a bunch of unrelated scientific terms all jammed together).
- Sci Fi Name Buzzwords: Most of the Future Slang is essentially a bunch of vaguely "space-y" terms blended together.
- Future Spandex: Many of the characters wear spandex and other form-fitting materials.
- A Good Name for a Rock Band: Microbe, not sure that's a "good" name.
- Hollywood Science
- The Metric System Is Here to Stay: Zenon is from a space station, but when she arrives on Earth, she explodes a test tube because she was thinking in Celsius when all the instructions were in Fahrenheit. In a science class.
- It could happen. The United States is one of the few nations in the world to still use non-Metric measurements at all, so it's possible that they'd use Fahrenheit in a classroom. Not everybody's as international as the people on the space station.
- Plucky Comic Relief: Nebula, Protozoa and the Microbes. The villians of the first and third movies aren't much better off really.
- Space Suits Are Scuba Gear
- Standard Establishing Spaceship Shot: Space Station shot. There are a couple in all three movies.
- Zeerust: Just look at the outfit.