Medfield College has a problem.  No one takes the college seriously.  Maybe if the college could win the big college quiz show, people would finally stop laughing at Medfield but the students are not academically talented.  Professor Quigley (William Schallert) thinks that the college needs to finally buy a new-fangled device called a computer.  The Dean (Joe Flynn) says that there’s no way any college can afford something as expensive as that!  Luckily, businessman and gangster A.J. Arno (Cesar Romero) is willing to donate one of his computers.  It takes several students to move the computer into the lab because the computer is huge.

Medfield finally has a computer but are the students smart enough to win that quiz show?  Popular jock Dexter Riley (Kurt Russell) happens to be in the lab during a freak thunderstorm.  When both he and the computer get struck by lightning at the same time, it leads to Dexter becoming a human computer.  He suddenly knows everything.  He can speak any language and solve any equation.  He can answer any question/  Whenever anyone shines a light into Dexter’s ear, they see circuit boards.  No one really cares that none of this makes sense.  Medfield is going to win that quiz show for sure!  But first, Dexter is going to have to escape from Arno, who fears Dexter now knows all the details about his gambling ring.

Watching this Disney film was a real eye-opener for me.  Computers are such a part of my everyday life that it was strange seeing a college making such a big deal about getting one.  The computer that Medfield got looked more like the type of computer that NASA used to go to the moon than the ones that were in my high school computer lab.  I was worried that no one seemed to care that Dexter had a circuit board in his head.  Not even Dexter seemed to care.  It was also funny to me that all he had to do was get struck by lightning while standing near a computer and suddenly, he knew how to speak every language and solve every problem.  I use a computer everyday and I can still only speak English and Spanish.  I feel like I’m getting cheated.

The whole movie was absolutely ludicrous but I did enjoy watching this movie.  It was too sweet, innocent, and good-natured not to enjoy.  There was nothing realistic about the movie but it was nice to imagine a world where everyone gets along, the bad guys are all too buffoonish to really be dangerous, and a serious knock on the head leads to thing returning to normal instead of permanent brain damage.  Kurt Russell was only 18 when he made The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes but he could already carry a movie.