There were two ways of playing Small Wonder : straight or for laughs. While the latter was the core reason why sitcoms exist, unfortunately many techies weren't too amused by some of Vicki's more off-the-wall abilities. In many ways techies were responsible for keeping the show on course and Vicki at least technically plausible (see forthcoming Keyhole feature "How Techies Groomed V.I.C.I."). It would've been very easy for the show to have strayed into "magic technology" just to get a laugh, but on the whole it didn't compromise its technical bible's principles. Except for a few social scenes, Vicki was played as a human-like machine and not a machine-like human (like Commander Data), and the powers vested in Vicki came under close fan scrutiny and suggestions.

An early example of this relationship is seen in "Vicki's Adoption," which portrayed Vicki shrinking to the size of a Barbie doll and growing as tall as Joan. While a cute gag to the casual viewer, techies and sci-fi purists slapped their brows and swore and wrote en masse to a surprised Small Wonder staff. As a result, Vicki never shrank or "grew" again.

Producers have an unseemly habit of taking a consultant's recommended technical ability for a character and puffing it into gross exaggerations. Techie fan mail recommended that, for concealment's sake, Ted "extend" the telescopic compression joints of Vicki's femur and humerus to make it appear as though she "grew" an inch or so during the series ("School Monitor"). The producers ran with this to extremes, resulting in "Battle of the Sexes and Robot," where Vicki (in a houserobe, curlers and slippers -- since when and for sleeping where?) stretches her arm 9 feet to fetch a jar across the kitchen, and in "Bank Hostages" and "The Bossy Daughter," where her legs do the elevator route by at least 5 feet. Another notorious stretch of credibility (pun intended!) was Vicki's ability to extend her neck a whole meter ("Nerd Crush," "Look into My Eyes," "The Rip-Off") and even spin her head 360 degrees ("First Love," "RoboSitter," "Digital Love"). There's no known engineering method by which this could be accomplished in a real-life V.I.C.I. without drastically compromising her natural head and shoulder movements, skin integrity, and upper torso's quasi-human physiognomy. Ironically, there was a neat (and better!) solution proposed by a robotics consultant working on similar devices, in which the fingernail of Vicki's index finger is also the (lighted) lens end of a fiber-optic link with her visual processor, in effect giving her a "third eye" to poke her fingertip into high door peepholes and shelves.

In "The Pool," Vicki uses her finger in a kind of "power screwdriver" mode to "torque-push" a screw into a stool, and in "Homeless Causes" and "The Bad Seedling" she seemingly rotates a blender pitcher and soup can by similar rotary wrist motion. Both are possible powers, but like spinning heads, at the expense of sacrificing the natural appearance of wrists and knuckles due to their required rotary segment joints.

As would any real-life domestic robot, Vicki's senses inevitably supersede those of a human, and you'd require this so they'd whiff gas before you do or detect potential hazards like burglars or unknown predators ("Homeless Causes"). In "Breakfast of Criminals," Vicki tastes a suspect additive in a breakfast cereal. Even availing off-the-shelf military technology of the 1980s, Vicki's senses would seem to border on witchcraft, from detecting presences through walls to hearing a mosquito flying from across the living room (though not "ants fighting over a crumb somewhere" as in "Ted's Lay-Off"). If one ignores such minor exaggerations, Vicki's fictional senses on the whole agree with technological possibility and feasibility.

Vicki's maximum speed and dexterity as depicted in "My Living Doll," "The Bossy Daughter," "My Robot Family" and "Little Miss Shopping Mall," has her turning into a red streak (no, not a pre-teen female Flash) hurtling away or playing table tennis with herself. In a rare agreement with techies, producers and Small Wonder bible, this capability would be well within the speculative dynamics of her myogel muscular system for short bursts (see DUNAHUE), and that her "cruise" household maintenance speed would be credible if not preferable at twice a human pace ("Little Miss Shopping Mall," "Girl on the Milk Carton") so very few voiced dissatisfaction with this ability.

In "Vicki and the Pusher," "The Russians Are Coming," and "Big 'J' Private Eye," Vicki is literally able to take off by flapping her arms like a hummingbird. Though aerodynamically impossible and preposterous in itself, this idea was proposed by a techie early on -- if Vicki was holding out two long planks and swiftly angled them perpendicular to the ground on each downstroke before the next upbeat. This techie was into aviation and reminded us that most of the "wacky" man-powered flying devices proposed since da Vinci and during the early days of flight failed only because human beings lack the strength and speed to power their plausible contraptions. Nevertheless, Vicki's unassisted flights were rebuked by techies and she made only three lift-offs.

In "Haunted House," Vicki levitates without flapping her arms, and the script has the Lawsons blind at noting that she isn't, to assume later that she's being suspended between walls and ceiling by the spurious power fluctuations of her lightning-damaged RTG, inducing a powerful electromagnetic field in her electrically grounded titanium skeleton. Under normal circumstances she could induce and control the strength and location of electromagnetic fields anywhere in her frame to manipulate nearby objects such as soda cans and kitchen utensils and even .32 caliber pistols, as in "The Wedding" and "Bank Hostages". In "Haunted House," in theory, were the Lawsons' ceiling made of steel plate and Vicki's magnetic flux finely balanced, it's conceivable she could be suspended near the ceiling so, like steel marbles between magnets in high school physics lab demonstrations. Ironically, it'd work better with carbon-based Tiffany's tiny 21-kilogram mass (during pilot) than with Vicki's speculated 55, since the power required from Vicki's RTG to lift her weight would've overheated her frame and most likely would've fried her electronics first. She flirts with this hazard whenever she jump-starts the family car ("Grandpa Lawson," "Ted's Dead") when she pumps up her RTG to discharge its near-maximum 90 amps DC through her metal skeleton and out her hands, which, not surprisingly, she called her hot flashes.

Vicki's thermal powers are the least understood though simple in concept, since she'd likely possess some subdermal radiator network of coolant circulating to draw off excess heat from her internal systems and myogel muscles. This is also the source of Vicki's human skin temperature. In theory, Vicki should be able to manipulate her radiator network (via micro-valves) to concentrate heat on parts of her skin or hands to over 375 degrees Fahrenheit to hand-pop air-popped popcorn ("Look into My Eyes") or boil coffee ("Bank Hostages") or scorch toast ("Girl on the Milk Carton") or light a barbecue with a fingertip ("I Hear You"), since her skin would be scorch-resistant to 450 degrees Fahrenheit anyway as a task performance factor working around heat or household chemicals. In theory, her skin can be made briefly resistant (not even singed!) by a blowtorch since such incredible coatings exist that can protect tissue paper from such heat. Inversely, it would be simple to reverse the coolant flow from some areas and create spot near-freezing temperatures for chilling drinks in her hands. ("Bank Hostages," "Earthquake Vicki" and "In the Spirits").

Of all Vicki's powers, the one most exaggerated was her strength, which in the series is never really defined except in Ted's gross quips, ranging from "she could light a city" ("The Bossy Daughter"), and by example as in shaking the house in its foundations ("Earthquake Vicki") to lifting whole trees out of the ground by the roots ("Babes in the Woods" and "Latchkey Dreams"). These exaggerations gave techies apoplexy and they wrote in about it, but after a while the staff was tired of being "pushed" and told what gags were and went on their own way. Technically, the Small Wonder bible, compiling the suggestions of story tech consultants, defines that the base-line physical ability of any true fully functional domestic robot is that it must be capable of moving sofas, desks and beds for cleaning and carrying away full garbage cans, buckets of water or heavy toolboxes up and down stairs, so Vicki right off the bat has a "default strength" of at least one muscular man and likely twice that as auxiliary and emergency.

In terms of maximum strength with feasible technology, a real-life V.I.C.I.'s credible physical ability, based on RTG output and novel myogel muscle system, would be roughly twice that of a chimpanzee her mass, or about that of two muscular men. By the show's bible, projecting the density of her speculative technology, Vicki is estimated to weigh around 55 kilograms (which would've made for same great gags had it actually been implemented on scripts). Therefore, she would have the strength of a 110-pound chimpanzee, so it would be within Vicki's ability to lift the sofa over her head and hurtle it and push a pickup truck down the street, but as for lifting cars and bending the barrel of a gun ("Community Watch and See"), nada. Vicki's jumping ability ("White Lies," "Vicki Doolittle," "Substitute Dad") where she makes 6-foot standing slam-dunks and 20-foot standing broadjumps, is consistent with her power output.

While not technically a "power" (i.e., superhuman ability), Vicki's ability to shed tears crosses the line when she's crying fountains ("Latchkey Dreams," "Have a Heart," "The Wedding" and "SuperSuds"). Tears weren't necessary for the purely domestic Vicki to pass as a human, being anatomically correct and perceptually perfect, but it's likely that for V.I.C.I.s programmed as behaviorally convincing surrogate children (see Dunahue) that such a feature would be installed.

Technical terms are explained in the Vicki On Dunahue feature