Dexter Riley and his friends attend small, private Medfield College, which cannot afford to buy a computer. The students persuade wealthy businessman A.J. Arno to donate an old computer to the college. Arno is the secret head of a large illegal gambling ring, which used the computer for its operations. While installing a replacement part during a thunderstorm, Riley receives an electric shock and becomes a human computer. He now has superhuman mathematical talent, can read and remember the contents of an encyclopedia volume in a few minutes and can speak a language fluently after reading one textbook. His new abilities make Riley a worldwide celebrity and Medfield's best chance to win a televised quiz tournament with a $100,000 prize. Riley single-handedly leads Medfield's team in victories against other colleges. During the tournament, a trigger word causes Riley to unknowingly recite on television details of Arno's gambling ring. Arno's henchmen kidnap Riley and plan to kill him, but his friends help him escape. Arno's home is being painted and in the rescue effort, Riley's friends put paint in the gas tanks of the henchmen's cars, causing them not to start, and following a brief chase in his own car, Arno ends up in a pile of hay. During the escape, Riley suffers a concussion which, during the tournament final against rival Springfield State, gradually returns his mental abilities to normal; one of his friends, however, is able to answer the final question. Medfield wins the $100,000 prize. Arno and his henchmen are arrested when they attempt to escape the TV studio and crash head-on into a police car.
of The New York Times wrote, "This 'Computer' isn't I.B.M.'s kind but it's homey, lovable, as exciting as porridge and as antiseptic and predictable as any homey, half-hour TV family show." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune reported, "I rather enjoyed 'The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes,' and I suspect children under 14 will like it, too." Arthur D. Murphy of Variety praised the film as "above-average family entertainment, enhanced in great measure by zesty, but never show-off, direction by Robert Butler, in a debut swing to pix from telefilm." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "Disney Productions latched on to a terrific premise for some sharp satire only to flatten it out by jamming it into its familiar 'wholesome' formula. Alas, the movie itself comes out looking like it had been made by a computer." The film holds a score of 50% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 6 reviews.
This film was remade as the television film The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes in 1995 starring Kirk Cameron as Dexter Riley. Other Disney Channel films carrying similar plot elements were the Not Quite Humanfilm series, which aired in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The films were based on the series of novels with the same name.
Title sequence
The animated title sequence, by future Academy Award-winning British visual effects artist Alan Maley, reproduced the look of contemporary computer graphics using stop motion photography of paper cutouts. It has been cited as an early example of "computational kitsch."
