But we all love to remember the kids we watched grow up on TV in sitcoms like "Leave It to Beaver" in the '50s, "My Three Sons" in the '60s, "The Brady Bunch" in the '70s and "Diff'rent Strokes" in the '80s.

"Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star," starring acerbic comedian David Spade in the title role, tackles the troubles that come after the show gets canceled and the limelight fades to black. Though the movie tries hard to be a moral tale, its brightest and truest moments are inevitably about slyly making fun of the scandal-ridden peep show the entertainment industry has been since the earliest days of little actors like Mary Pickford and Jackie Coogan.

As the "True Hollywood Story" that opens the movie recounts, Dickie Roberts was the star of the hit '70s sitcom "The Glimmer Gang." But Roberts, the quirky, wisecracking kid (his signature line was "Nucking Futs"), went kicking and screaming from puberty to obscurity without ever growing up.

At 35, Spade's Roberts is a has-been man-child parking cars in the promised land of Los Angeles. He deals with his germ phobia by wearing gloves 24/7. He attempts to cope with the psychic damage of being abandoned by his stage mother by hanging and kvetching with a cadre of poker-playing fellow former child stars -- including Danny Bonaduce, Leif Garrett, Barry Williams, Corey Feldman and Dustin Diamond as themselves. And his manager, played with messy abandon by Jon Lovitz, is even more hapless than Roberts.

After a celebrity boxing match with Emmanuel Lewis fails to launch the comeback he longs for, Roberts uses what's left of his Tinseltown wiles to land an audition with Rob Reiner. But he's knocked back when Reiner explains that because Roberts never really had a childhood, he isn't normal enough for a starring role as an adult.

The rest of the movie is a series of pratfalls that focus on Roberts' scheme, Operation Redo Childhood. He joins a supposedly normal suburban family that he believes will "reboot him like a human computer." But will he end up like Ronnie Howard of "The Andy Griffith Show" and become a Hollywood success story, or fall to pieces like Rusty Hamer of "Make Room for Daddy" and wind up a "TV Babylon" suicide?

Director Sam Wiseman, who once directed "Who's the Boss," bluffs a bit, then stacks the deck. Beyond some raunchy humor and brutal physical comedy -- funny in fits

and starts -- he wants a movie with a heart of gold. So he plays up his heroes and villains in sitcomlike high relief. Roberts' new "mom," Mary McCormack, is arrayed in the soft glow of virginal splendor. New "dad" Craig Bierko is a swarthy car salesman and a jerk of a husband and father.

But as much as the movie tries to teach about the toxic consequences of fame, and preach that heaven is in our own back yard, that nagging need to amuse an audience fascinated with celebrity gossip is ever-present. And as ironic proof that Hollywood is a beast that must be fed, two real child actors, Scott Terra and Jenna Boyd, star alongside Spade.

Despite the satirical happy ending to "Dickie Roberts," you might be left wondering what will happen to Terra and Boyd when they stop being so cute. Are they destined to be like little Dickie?