Zapped!

Before "Weird Science" was a twinkle in John Hughes eyes, Scott Baio was an unlucky in love science geek who develops telekinetic powers and changes his life completely.

Released in 1982 and starring former Happy Days’ star Scott Baio and Willie Aames, Zapped tells the story of Barney Springboro, a high school senior at Ralph Waldo Emerson High School. A geek to the core, Barney’s experiments include a formula for accelerating growth rate in cannabis, documenting mice to swim under the influence of Jack Daniels and seeing how they react when stoned.

A sidekick if you wish, Barney is best friends with Peyton (Aames) who is one of the schools rich kids who pretty much does whatever he wants, including having a relationship with one of the teachers and trying to get into the pants of Jane (Heather Thomas) - the most popular cheerleader in school.

The fun begins after some of Barney’s growth formula is accidentally mixed with his cannabis extract and Peyton adds a sneaky drop of beer and given to one of the mice he’s experimenting on. The formula explodes in the lab and Barney gets caught in it; however he doesn’t realise that he’s gained powers until the next morning when he unwittingly causes a map to fly across his classroom and then later makes Jane (Heather Thomas) flash at him and Peyton. Knowing something’s fishy, Barney returns to the science lab to clean up and test his powers.

With floating test tubes and a broom doing its own version of the Sorcerers Apprentice, he’s having too much fun to realise that the pushy year book editor and his best friend have been spying on him through the science lab window and have both figured out that these powers can be used for something good

Bernadette (Schachter) insists that Barney use his powers to carry out research into a phenomenon that people have been trying to prove for years. While Peyton wants Barney to use his powers for, well his good. Now that Barney’s got powers to make people do things, he starts using them to win the final baseball game, defeat bullies and even uses them at home to scare his mother into believing that he’s possessed by the devil – which leads to a hilarious projectile vomiting scene on prom night when she decides to call a priest to exorcise him.

Will Barneys new powers be his undoing? You'll just have to watch and see...