It was the summer of 1986 and I was four years old. I’m almost positive I was at the Dedham cinema in Massachusetts with my brother and my grandmother to see Karate Kid 2, which, I think, may have been the second movie I ever saw in a theater, the first being Follow that Bird in the summer of 1985.
Either before or after seeing Karate Kid 2, I have a vivid memory of milling around in the main lobby of the cinema—maybe we were standing in line at the refreshment stand or something—and I remember seeing an advertisement for the movie Flight of the Navigator, which was to be released later in the month on July 30th. I’m almost absolutely positive that this “advertisement” was not a simple movie poster but more like a three-dimensional carboard display that hung down from the ceiling’s lobby. I’ve since done some research using AI, and although I can’t find any pictures to confirm my memories, these kinds of advertisements were likely to exist, at least according to Google’s artificial intelligence. I’m thinking that an ad that hung from the ceiling may have made sense, since the movie was about a UFO, so maybe the ad was trying to simulate a flying saucer hovering in the air—who knows.
Whatever the advertisement was—whether it was a movie poster or something cooler—all I know is I, a four-year-old at the time, was completely transfixed by it. The ad was calling my name (much like how the extraterrestrial voices telepathically call David’s name in the movie, but we’ll get to all that in a moment). The advertisement featured the main character of the movie, a 12-year-old boy named David, sitting in a metallic spaceship that was simple yet so cool-looking. He was apparently the “navigator” of this ship. The ad successfully communicated the concept of a young kid taking on a very adult role: i.e. being the navigator of a spaceship. And such a concept was very intriguing to me. Heck, I couldn’t even read at the time, but I somehow knew that this movie was called Flight of the Navigator and it was coming out soon and it looked so awesome. Talk about a successful ad campaign. It was Disney marketing at its finest.
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| This was the kind of image featured in the ad I saw. |
So you would think that I would have been first in line to see this movie when it was released in theaters, right?
Well, I don’t think I ever did.
In fact, I don’t think I ever saw Flight of the Navigator until it was on the Disney Channel at least a year after its theatrical release. Remember the Disney Channel? Or I should probably say remember the Disney Channel when it was actually good?
Back in the later half of the 1980s and into the 1990s, the only premium “movie channel” my family had as part of our cable package was the Disney Channel. At the time, I dreamt of having a premium channel like Showtime or at least HBO, but my parents were having none of that. My mom and dad basically said you can have the Disney channel or you can have NOTHING, so, in fear of having nothing, my siblings and I took the Disney Channel.
Since it was the only “movie channel” we had, I watched A LOT of the Disney Channel when I was a kid. And although it was a channel I watched somewhat begrudgingly at the time, when I look back on it now, I have to say that the Disney Channel in the late-1980s to mid-1990s was a fregging awesome channel! Not only were there random Disney movies on at all random hours of the day, but there were also shows like Gummi Bears, The Mickey Mouse Club (both the old versions with Annette Funicello and contemporary versions with a young Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Ryan Gosling, Justin Timberlake etc.) Kids Incorporated, Mousercise, Pooh’s Corner and Danger Bay, just to name a few of the shows. There were also Disney holiday specials like A Mickey’s Christmas Carol and one of my favorite Halloween specials to this day: Disney’s Halloween Treat. Throw in sporadic Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck cartoons here and there, as well as older 1950s-era Disneyland (aka Wonderful World of Disney) episodes hosted by Walt Disney himself, and you’re really talking about one hell of a channel that I only wish still existed today.
1980s-era Disney Channel.
Anyway, I’m almost positive that the first time I saw Flight of the Navigator was when it was shown, commercial-free, one Sunday evening on the Disney Channel, most likely as part of the more contemporary version of Wonderful World of Disney (hosted, I believe, by Disney CEO Michael Eisner at that point), a special program that showed a different movie every Sunday.
I was hooked right from the opening of the movie, which, by the way, is one of the best openings in any movie I’ve ever seen. In the very first shot, we see what-looks-like a silver-colored flying saucer floating over the Fort Lauderdale city skyline and we hear mysterious, eerie-sounding music (scored by Alan Silvestri). What is happening???? we’re wondering. But then we see a dog come out of nowhere and catch this flying saucer in its mouth. Why, it wasn’t a flying saucer after all! It was a frisbee! What ensues is this awesome opening title sequence featuring several different breeds of dogs at the “1978 South Florida Frisbee Dog Championship.” The music is no longer eerie but very happy and the shots of the dogs catching the frisbee are shot at a high frame rate (i.e. slow motion). It’s a beautiful sequence with beautiful photography and, again, it’s one of my favorite opening title sequences in all of cinema.
The Flight of the Navigator title sequence.
Once the titles end, we meet the main character, a 12-year-old boy named David (played by Joey Cramer) who is at the frisbee contest with his parents, his annoying little brother Jeff and his dog Bruiser. After the frisbee contest is over, they all go home to their house in Fort Lauderdale and the plan is to eat hamburgers and watch fireworks later that evening because it’s the Fourth of July. On the car-ride home, however, Jeff gets dropped off to play at a friend’s house and then, later that night, David has to go pick him up, which involves a half-mile walk through the creepy woods. Jeff jumps out of a tree, scares David and runs off. David is about to chase after him, but then he hears his dog Bruiser barking at something. David goes to check out what Bruiser is barking at and then accidentally falls into a ravine and goes unconscious. He wakes up what-seems-like a few minutes later, goes back home, but not only does he find that the inside of his house looks completely different but two total strangers are now living there!
The strangers call the police and David is identified as a boy who went missing 8 years ago. Yes, the year is no longer 1978 but 1986! The police then locate David’s parents who are living in a different house now. His mom and dad are 8 years older than they were when David last saw them and David’s younger brother Jeff is now his older brother.
A series of tests are performed on David to try and figure out what happened to him, where he disappeared to for eight years and why he hasn’t aged. During one test, his brainwaves somehow produce an image of a UFO, which gets the attention of a NASA scientist named Dr. Faraday (played by Howard Hesseman) who has recently discovered a UFO that looks just like the one David has produced in his mind (incidentally, the UFO looks kind of like one of those Nerf turbo footballs from the late-1980s). Faraday wants to know what the spaceship is and where it came from. David wants to know where he’s been for eight years and why he hasn’t aged. Thus, David agrees to go to NASA and be studied by Faraday and his scientists for 48 hours.
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| The spaceship in Flight of the Navigator. |
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| The Nerf Turbo Football. Doesn't it look similar to the spaceship? |
While at NASA, David’s brain is hooked up to a computer and he begins communicating information to the computer that no 12-year-old boy should know, or no human being should know for that matter. His mind is apparently full of extraterrestrial information, including star charts that tell the scientists exactly what planet the mysterious spaceship came from. It’s not long before Faraday realizes David was likely abducted by extraterrestrials and must have traveled at the speed of light for only 4.4 hours David’s time, which is actually 8 years in earth’s time. This “lightspeed theory” would account for David not having aged at all. Fascinated by this new development, Faraday now wants more time to study the boy. 48 hours will NOT be enough.
David doesn’t know that Faraday plans on keeping him confined to NASA for longer than expected until a NASA intern named Carolyn (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) informs David that his “meal sheet” has already been scheduled all the way through the upcoming week. Upset that Faraday broke his promise about keeping him there only 48 hours, David escapes his confinement with the help of Carolyn’s robot sidekick named R.A.L.F. and seeks out the UFO that has been telepathically calling for David to come to it.
R.A.L.F. brings David to the NASA hangar where the UFO is being stored and the metallic-looking spaceship opens its doors for him. Upon entering the UFO, David learns that it is a “Trimaxion” drone ship operated by an extraterrestrial computer-like system that David nicknames “Max” (voiced by Paul Reubens of Pee-wee Herman fame). Max explains that David’s brain is being used as a kind of hard drive to store star charts that the ship now needs in order to go home. David is therefore referred to as the “navigator.”
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| A beautiful shot of David standing within the metallic spaceship. |
David, however, doesn’t want to give up the star charts unless he gets something in return. He strikes a deal that he’ll give Max the navigational charts if Max agrees to take David home to his family and far away from NASA. Max agrees, but, in the process of the “mind transfer,” Max mistakenly downloads the personality of the 12-year-old David into his own mind and essentially starts acting like, well, Pee-wee Herman himself.
For the sake of not spoiling the rest of the movie, I will leave the synopsis at that, but suffice it to say that there is a lot of fun-filled adventure that ensues as soon as the spaceship gets airborne and tries to navigate its way to David’s home.
Now, when I first saw the movie on the Disney Channel in the late-1980s, I absolutely fell in love with it. To my great luck, the Disney Channel kept playing the movie on multiple occasions after that initial Sunday night special and I watched the movie every time I knew it was scheduled to be on.
After a while, I think Flight of the Navigator stopped playing on the Disney channel, but I do know that they played it again in the 1990s and I caught several viewings of the movie around that time as well.
After the 1990s, however, I don’t think I ever saw Flight of the Navigator for several years, maybe even for a couple of decades. About four years ago (during COVID in the year 2021), I decided to find myself a DVD copy of the movie through the local library network. I watched the DVD and fell in love with the movie all over again.
A year or two later, I bought myself a DVD copy for me to own, so I could watch the movie at any time I wanted to. Since then, I have watched the movie three or four times, pretty much once a year, right around the Fourth of July. As nerdy as I may sound in saying this, watching Flight of the Navigator has become an annual Independence Day tradition for me, much like one would watch a movie like National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation around Christmas time.
Putting all my nostalgia for the movie aside, I have to say as an objective, dispassionate adult that the movie is a very good movie. If I’m going to be intellectually honest, however, I would also have to say that it is a good movie for the first two thirds and the last third of the movie is not as good. Basically, once Max completes the mind transfer and Paul Reubens’ voice essentially becomes that of Pee-wee Herman, the movie takes a bit of a downhill turn. It’s still fun, but not as good as the preceding two thirds of the movie. In the movie’s third act, Max gets a little too silly for my taste and the movie suddenly seems to turn into too much of a kids movie. It’s almost as though some Disney suit-wearing executives stepped in at a certain point and had to remind the director (Randal Kleiser) that they were making a movie for kids and so the director suddenly shifted the movie’s tone to less adult science fiction and more of a kids movie, and when I say kids movie, I mean that it becomes a movie that is purposely dumbed down to pander to kids of the lowest common denominator. I mean, the first two thirds of the movie have the characters dropping S-bombs for cry eye; it’s definitely PG teetering on the edge of PG-13. But then, boom, the movie suddenly becomes something else. Max starts sounding like Pee-wee Herman and everything becomes altogether sillier and G-rated. In fact, I would say that there is a distinct point when the movie takes a turn for the worse and that moment is when Max laughs like Pee-wee Herman. Yes, that’s the exact point where everything shifts. I’m wondering if the Disney execs—those suits!—pulled Paul Reubens aside during the production of the film and basically said, “Hey, kids love the Pee-wee voice, right? What this movie needs is some Pee-wee voice! How could we go wrong with having the Pee-wee voice?!” Well, Disney, you DID go wrong. It was foolish, I tells ya! Foolish!
There’s almost a part of me that wants to take the first two thirds of the movie and then re-do the last third, at least a tad, because I feel like the movie could have been even better than it already is, if only the director had stayed consistent and stuck with the tone and vibe of the movie’s first two acts.
But, again, this isn’t to say that the movie isn’t a great movie, nor am I saying that it isn’t a favorite of mine. There are actually two favorite parts of the movie that I would like to highlight in particular.
The first part is this beautiful shot of the spaceship being transported down a highway by a large flatbed truck. A very long lens (i.e. telephoto lens) is used for this shot and the music underscoring the scene is eerie, foreboding and captivating.
The second part is when David escapes his solitary confinement at the NASA base via the robot R.A.L.F. This “escape” is shown via a kind of montage sequence, underscored by very ‘80s synth-heavy music that is so awesome. Again, a long lens is used to shoot many of the shots in this sequence and there is this beautiful, magic-hour sunrise backdrop. I have a feeling that I’m not alone in thinking this sequence is one of the best in the film, if not THE best.
The escape sequence.
Taking such greats sequences into account, it’s clear that the movie’s director had a lot of talent and I again feel that Disney executives were more responsible for the last third of the movie than he was. Left to the director’s own devices, I think Flight of the Navigator would have not just been a great movie but something on the level of amazing, a true cult classic. I almost want to go back in time and make sure the film is made right, from beginning to end, but I of course can’t do that (yet … just wait a few years for time travel technology to advance).
There is also a part of me that wants to remake—not just the third act—but the entire movie, as a kind of 1980s throwback reboot, but I also acknowledge that I would likely never capture the magic of the original movie. In 2021, Disney actually announced that it would be remaking the movie, but they planned on doing it with a girl as the protagonist instead of a boy. Whaaaaaat? A girl instead of a boy? Blasphemy!!! Who knows: such a remake could end up being … uh, kiiiind of interesting … but it would certainly not be as magical as the original 1986 movie.
Of course, it’s now 2025 as I write this and Disney still hasn’t delivered the female-driven remake it promised everybody. The project has supposedly been in “development hell” for four years and may never end up coming to fruition.[i] I’m secretly hoping it won’t happen, to be honest with you. Even if they scrapped the whole girl protagonist idea and used a boy, I still don’t think they would make the reboot anywhere close to how I would want it to be done.
Plus, I really don’t want them to muck up the Flight of the Navigator “brand” (for lack of a better word) with something subpar, mainly because I don’t want my memories of the movie to be tarnished in any way. When I think about it, there is no other movie from my childhood that I have such fond memories of and, really, these memories have little to do with the actual movie itself. The most sacred of my memories involve that one advertisement I saw for the movie in the Dedham Showcase Cinema lobby when I was four years old in 1986. Seeing that one ad got my imagination running wild about what, possibly, this Flight of the Navigator movie was all about. Although the movie ended up being a favorite of mine when I actually ended up seeing it, it was my imagination of what the movie could be, before ever seeing it, that I will remember the most.
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MATT BURNS is the author of several novels, including Weird Monster, Supermarket Zombies!, The Woman and the Dragon and Johnny Cruise. He’s also written numerous memoirs, including GARAGE MOVIE: My Adventures Making Weird Films, My Raging Case of Beastie Fever, Jungle F’ng Fever: My 30-Year Love Affair with Guns N’ Roses and I Turned into a Misfit! Check out these books (and many more) on his Amazon author page HERE.
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SOURCES:
[i] Walters, Jack. “Disney Announced an Exciting 1980s Sci-Fi Remake 3 Years Ago, But I’m Worried it Won’t Happen.” Screen Rant. 2 November 2024, https://screenrant.com/disney-flight-of-the-navigator-sci-fi-movie-remake-happen/.
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