American Dad!, "The Shrink"

"The Shrink." American Dad, season 10, episode 12 (30 March 2015). See IMDb entry for directors, writers, and impressive cast.[1]

Logline/IMDb Brief Summary: "Stan is traumatized by a random act of violence" — the fall of a large sign on a cab Stan almost took, killing driver and passengers (plus heart attack killing driver of cab Stan did take) — "and seeks to establish a sense of control by creating a miniature version of Langley Falls."[2] Using a shrink/enlargement-ray device from the CIA, Stan shrinks himself to where he can live in his perfect little world, and shrinks the human members of his family to live there with him. The chaos Stan fears intrudes in the person of a drunk and headset-wearing Roger, who breaks a bottle of wine, which is drunk by ants who then climb the table into the miniature world to get to the food Stan has stored there as a mashed potatoes (with some fixings) mountain. There is also a toy train that Stan attempts to put on high speed and use to smash the town dam and drown the ants, but which unshrunk Roger just hurls into the dam.

There is a specific dialog reference to BACK TO THE FUTURE — Part 3 features a locomotive — and technologically-induced shrinkage appears in Frederik Pohl's "The Tunnel Under the World" and is an SF film motif: cf. and contrast, among others The NECEN Voyage, ANT-MAN (film), FANTASTIC VOYAGE, DOWNSIZING, and the Archer episode "Drastic Voyage." (The protagonist of THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN shrinks after exposure to a radioactive cloud with a later dose of insecticide, causing mutation — so the technological involvement is less direct and not presented visually.)[3]

RDE, Initial Compiler, 15Aug18