Sara (Maia Brewton) from Adventures in Babysitting (1987)
Maia Brewton (bottom) as little sibling Sara in Adventures in Babysitting
While other children her age are obsessed with Barbie dolls and playing dress-up, pre-teen hellion Sara Anderson has a different idol: Thor. While she still plays dress-up, instead of donning high heels and Mom’s makeup, her outfit of choice is a plastic winged helmet and a superhero cape.
Sara’s adventurous spirit serves her well as she’s led around the seedy Chicago underworld by her babysitter (Elisabeth Shue from The Karate Kid), whose impromptu trip to rescue her friend from a bus station leaves her—and the three siblings she watching—tangling with car thieves, mob bosses and gangs. While Sara’s childlike innocence is cute when it makes her believe a surly mechanic (Vincent D’Onofrio) is Thor in disguise (long, blonde locks and carries a hammer = God of Thunder), maybe her older sibling Brad (Keith Coogan) should’ve pulled her aside at some point and told her that it’s not actually possible to fly.
Then, when Sara found herself chased around an office building by the leader of a ring of car thieves, she might have done the smart thing and yelled blue murder for an adult, instead of attempting to scale down the side of a skyscraper. Had it not been for her last-minute rescue, it’s a pretty sure thing that those plastic wings on her helmet wouldn’t have stopped her plummeting 44 floors to her death.
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