Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001)

Image credit: Jimmy Neutron

WEIRD SCIENTIST An inventive Jimmy Neutron gets gadget-happy

There's a galaxy of difference between old-fashioned clever and information-age clever. Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius is a lickety-split, madly packed, roller-coaster entertainment that might almost have been designed to make you scared of how much smarter your kids are than you. In this digital-animated gizmo, Jimmy, the outrageously matter-of-fact young brainiac, seems to have crammed all the knowledge in the world into his genial, oversize, Ace Ventura-coiffed head.

Jimmy is a new kind of cool-geek wizard, and the ''shiny as a bubble'' ''Jimmy Neutron'' is packed with more nimble and ingenious gags than all two and a half hours of ''Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.'' Jimmy, when he isn't inventing atomic domestic gadgets, foils an attack by squishy green aliens who live in clear synthetic eggs; it's ''Peter Pan'' meets ''Men in Black.'' Best scene: Jimmy and his pals go on a rampage of fun -- to the Ramones' ''Blitzkreig Bop.''