1986 family adventure
Rating: 14/20 (Abbey: 14/20; Buster: 20/20)
Plot: A missing kid returns 8 years later, and NASA takes interest and buys him a Transformers toy because they believe aliens were involved.
I guess we'll call this the first time that I saw Flight of the Navigator. I was 12 when I went to a theater with some friends to see this movie, but I had broken my glasses and couldn't see the screen. I thought the movie sounded fine, but all these 80's E.T./Goonies-inspired movies are always a little too loud. 80's kids enjoyed bombast, I guess. They also liked lots of name-calling in their movies. You know, like dork or scuzz bucket.
Once again, the time travel stuff doesn't make a lot of sense if you think about it even a little bit, but this is an entertaining little slice of Disney sci-fi. I really liked a brief scene with a bunch of goofy Muppet creatures. One's just an eye that screeches "Ai ai ai ai" like it's Charo or something, and Puckmarin reminds me a little of Stitch. I also really liked the flying scenes and the look of the spaceship.
Sleek! The cool materializing steps, the shiny and complex material. This is one cool ship, and those 80's kids were probably jealous of young Joey Cramer for getting to pilot that thing. What happened to Joey Cramer, by the way? Did he become Fred Savage?
Nevermind, I just answered my own question. They look exactly the same. And that's not racist because I am white and only a couple months younger than Cramer/Savage.
Speaking of missing children, where did Albie Whitaker, the weird-looking kid who played Cramer's brother in 1978, go? This was his only performance. He's got more threads on imdb.com than he does items on his filmography. (Both threads are people wondering what happened to him.) I guess it's possible that he didn't get any more roles because he looked like this:
Now that I think about it, I doubt "scuzz bucket" or "dork" were words that anybody used in 1978.
Ok, I looked that one up because I have nothing better to do with my time. Dork, as we know and love it, came into use in the late-60s. In the earlier 60s, it was a vulgar slang term for the penis. I couldn't find any information on scuzz bucket or scuzzbucket.
You know who else is in this movie? Paul Reubens, who voices the robot or whatever the hell it is. At the point where the ship starts laughing with Pee Wee Herman's recognizable chortle, that this starts to wear out its welcome. The flying scenes are still cool, the perspective shots almost looking like a ride at Epcot Center or something, but after a while, you're kind of just ready for the kid to find his way back into 1978. Good ol' Howard Hesseman is also in this, and so is a young Sarah Jessica Parker.
How about all those UFO fake-outs at the beginning of the movie. You get a "Hey! That's a UFO; no, it's only a Frisbee" moment. That's followed closely by a "Look! A UFO! No, wait. It's a blimp" moment. And then there's a "Ok, that's definitely a UFO. Nope--it's a water tower" moment. I'm just going to go ahead and blame Spielberg for that whether that's fair or not.
Here's something I thought about while watching this. When Fred Savage meets Sarah Jessica Parker's character with that crappy robot, we get to see part of a music video by a band called Blancmange. Parker, shocked, asks, "You've never seen a music video before?" Sadly, that could probably apply to kids now, too. Later, there's a little Twisted Sister, and for the second movie in a row, the Beach Boys show up. Once again, it seems as if makers of time travel movies are screwing with me. The score for this is dated but really cool, by the way. Mystery tones and adventure notes, the perfect soundtrack for family space adventures.
You know something else I wondered about? There's a reference in this to the "Pixar Elliptic," and one line borrows Don Rickles' "you hockey puck" insult just like Toy Story. Were the Pixar people fans? Nevermind. Forget I typed that because it's stupid.
In a movie like this, you'd expect to see product placement. And, of course, you do. There are McDonalds mentions, Coke allusions, and another shot at poor Twinkies. What did the Twinkie people do to deserve this treatment in science fiction movies?
This is a fun little movie, but I bet I would have liked it a lot more as a bespectacled 12 year old.
I should not have written blog entries tonight. These are unreadable.
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