Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Flight Of The Navigator

Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg had their work cut out for them when they took over at Disney. The struggling studio was not profitable and not respected. Their efforts to turn the ship around centered on Touchstone Pictures, reshaping the animation division, and a renewed focus on the parts of the studio that actually made money, namely theme parks and television. Live-action movies bearing the Disney name were a distant afterthought.

In 1986, you were more likely to see the classic Disney logo in front of an old movie than a new one. The studio re-released four of its animated classics to theatres: One Hundred And One Dalmatians, Sleeping Beauty, Song Of The South (in its last big push to date and probably ever) and Lady And The Tramp. Disney was continuing to hold its home video cards tightly to its chest, so all these re-releases did quite well. How could they not? They were essentially a license to print free money.

But Eisner and Katzenberg seemed to want to wait and see how well Disney’s image makeover took hold before they invested much into new productions. To fill the gap and keep the Disney name alive at the box office while mitigating their own risk, they entered into a few strategic partnerships, picking up the domestic distribution rights to a handful of otherwise independent productions. Flight Of The Navigator, Disney’s second and last new release of 1986, was one of these.

The film started life as an original screenplay called Vanished written by newcomer Mark H. Baker. The script attracted a great deal of attention, ultimately landing with producers Jonathan Sanger, Dimitri Villard and Robby Wald. After trying and failing to cut a deal directly with Disney, they set the project up with Producers Sales Organization, a company run by former actor Mark Damon that revolutionized the independent film market. Damon’s company struck the distribution deal with Disney, who ended up having a lot of say over the direction of the movie.

As with a lot of first-time screenwriters, Baker’s script was heavily rewritten. He ended up with a story credit, while the screenplay was credited to Michael Burton and Matt MacManus. According to IMDb, MacManus was a pseudonym for Phil Joanou, the future director of such films as Three O’Clock High and the U2 documentary Rattle And Hum. I can find no corroborating evidence for this claim. The timeline makes sense but prior to being handpicked by Steven Spielberg to direct a 1985 episode of the anthology series Amazing Stories, Joanou’s reputation rested on his visually stylish USC thesis film, not as a writer for hire. Also, Joanou’s own website, which provides a pretty thorough breakdown of his career, makes no mention of Flight Of The Navigator. I’m not saying this isn’t true but I would take it with a grain of salt or two.

The film’s director was Randal Kleiser, a TV veteran who’d made a big transition to features with the blockbuster Grease. Kleiser’s subsequent films had been decidedly R-rated, including The Blue Lagoon, Summer Lovers and Grandview, U.S.A. But he must have enjoyed his first Disney experience. We’ll see more of Kleiser’s work in this column soon.

Our story opens on July 4, 1978 (just a few weeks after “You’re The One That I Want” by John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John fell out of the top of Billboard’s Hot 100, making Kleiser’s little nod to Grease one of those rare Easter Eggs that actually make sense within the context of the film). The all-American Freeman family, dad Bill (Cliff De Young), mom Helen (Veronica Cartwright), kids David (Joey Cramer) and Jeff (Albie Whitaker) and dog Bruiser, are spending the afternoon at the South Florida Frisbee Dog Championship before heading home for burgers and fireworks later. All in all, it sounds like a pretty nice way to spend a holiday.

Jeff stops off to play with some friends, while David heads back to his room to mull over typical tween crises like his crush on Jennifer Bradley (Keri Rogers) and Bruiser’s total inability to cut it as a Frisbee dog. When Jeff calls to say he’s on his way back, Helen asks David to go meet his younger brother and walk him home. In the woods, David chases after Bruiser when he goes to investigate some strange noises. He tails the dog to the edge of a steep ravine and accidentally tumbles in.

David regains consciousness, seemingly moments later and none the worse for wear. He returns home, only to find his family gone and the place under new ownership. The police are called in and Detective Banks (Raymond Forchion) finds David’s missing person’s report and tracks down his parents’ new address. David’s excitement is short-lived, however, when he discovers that everyone is eight years older and the year is now 1986.

Meanwhile, a team from NASA led by Dr. Louis Faraday (Howard Hesseman) have been called to the site of a strange discovery. An impregnable craft of apparently extra-terrestrial origin has crashed into some power lines. Faraday has the ship transported back to Cape Canaveral for further study. (Once there, perhaps he consulted with Ken Berry, whose own NASA team made a similar discovery in The Cat From Outer Space.)

David is taken to the hospital for tests to determine why he hasn’t aged in eight years. While hooked up to an EEG, his mind starts subconsciously communicating directly with the computers. After he produces a schematic of the captured ship, he’s handed over to Dr. Faraday, who assures the Freemans that he’ll return David safe and sound in 48 hours.

The locked door, two-way mirror and gigantic stack of 1986’s hottest toys lead David to smell a rat. But he agrees to more tests that reveal the ship hails from the planet Phaelon, which is where David spent the last eight years although it was only a few hours for him. It also shows that David’s head is now jam-packed with alien information, including star charts to unexplored corners of the universe.

Realizing that the NASA bigwigs aren’t about to let him go home and struggling to make sense of an alien presence attempting to communicate with him telepathically, David resolves to escape. He recruits the help of friendly intern Carolyn (Sarah Jessica Parker in an early role) to get a message to his folks and uses Carolyn’s conveniently child-sized delivery robot R.A.L.F. to get to the ship.

The spacecraft turns out to be a Trimaxion Drone Ship piloted by an artificial intelligence David decides to call Max (and is voiced by Paul Reubens going by the name “Paul Mall”…no detective work necessary to figure out who’s behind this pseudonym). Max has been on a mission to collect various lifeforms for study on Phaelon, one of whom happened to be David. He was returning them to their home planets when he crashed. Without the star charts locked in David’s head, he won’t be able to complete his mission.

Max downloads the contents of David’s brain and the transfer goes perfectly, up to a point. But because Max had to transfer everything, he takes on the erratic behavior of a 12-year-old boy (and begins to sound just like Pee-wee Herman). Max agrees to take David home but since David didn’t have a road atlas stored in his memory, they take a circuitous, round-the-world journey to get there with the authorities following as best they can.

When Flight Of The Navigator was released in 1986, I was one of those 16-year-olds who wouldn’t be caught dead seeing a Disney movie (I made an exception for the animated movies because I was a fan of the medium). So I somehow managed to miss it until sitting down to watch it for this column. I’d made a mistake back then because Flight Of The Navigator is pretty delightful.

Part of what makes it work is the sheer simplicity of the story. This is a textbook example of what used to be called a boy’s adventure tale. The first half (which I honestly think works a little better than the second) is a genuinely compelling mystery. Once it switches gears to become a sci-fi adventure, it loses a bit of momentum. The movie turns over all its cards a little too soon and could use another secret or two to reveal. But it makes up for it with Reubens’ exuberant personality, some pretty decent visual effects including a handful of imaginative alien lifeform puppets, and a clear understanding of what kind of movie it wants to be.

Randal Kleiser knew what he was doing on this project and instills the movie with a sense of fun, wonder and clever visual flourishes. There’s a recurring motif at the beginning where Kleiser will give us glimpses of things that we at first think are UFOs but turn out to be ordinary objects like Frisbees and the Goodyear blimp. And while it might seem like unnecessary padding, it’s hard to be mad at a movie whose opening credits play over slow-motion footage of some outstanding dogs chasing Frisbees.

Kleiser also recruited his brother, Jeff, to be in charge of the film’s visual effects. Jeff Kleiser’s company, Digital Effects, had been one of the teams recruited to work on Tron. For Flight Of The Navigator, his company developed an innovative reflection mapping program that brought the spaceship’s chrome surface to life. The film also featured some of the earliest examples of morphing, as the ship transforms into a more aerodynamic shape. A few years later, James Cameron would push these techniques even further in Terminator 2 and he acknowledged that the inspiration came from Flight Of The Navigator.

But the movie’s secret weapon is young Joey Cramer’s performance as David. Cramer had appeared in a couple of movies prior to this, including Michael Crichton’s Runaway and The Clan Of The Cave Bear, as well as an episode of The Disney Sunday Movie called I-Man with Scott Bakula (that may have been shot after Flight Of The Navigator). But he really has to anchor this movie and he is more than up to the task. He’s a natural presence but the moments that land hardest are those when he first arrives in 1986. His fear and confusion feel absolutely real. It’s easy to identify with David. It’s even easier to like him and want to go on this adventure with him.

Sadly, Joey Cramer never had the opportunity to capitalize on Flight Of The Navigator. Not long after the movie came out, he decided to go home to Canada and finish school. This wasn’t easy and he ended up having an even harder time of it than most child actors. He eventually became addicted to drugs and alcohol, did time in and out of jail and wound up on the streets. At his lowest point, he robbed a bank, hoping to walk out with enough cash to score a lethal quantity of heroin.

If that’s where Joey Cramer’s story ended, it would be the saddest fate of any Disney child star since Bobby Driscoll’s anonymous death back in 1968. Fortunately, Cramer’s arrest and subsequent jail time for robbery helped him turn his life around. He has since gotten clean and appears to be doing well these days. There’s a good documentary about him (and Flight Of The Navigator in general) called Life After The Navigator that’s worth checking out. It has some good tidbits about the movie but even if you’re not a fan, Cramer’s story is moving and inspirational.

Flight Of The Navigator was released on August 1, 1986. It placed 9^th at the box office that weekend. By comparison, Howard The Duck, which opened the same day, came in third. But good word of mouth enabled Flight Of The Navigator to hang on for several weeks, unlike Howard. It hadn’t cost a lot to make (again, unlike Howard), so it ended up doing all right for itself.

In the years following, Flight Of The Navigator slowly but surely picked up a cult following thanks to near-constant airings on the Disney Channel and the miracle of home video. Disney is well aware of that fanbase and today, it’s one of those movies that occasionally comes up as potential remake fodder. Everyone from Colin Trevorrow to Neill Blomkamp to Bryce Dallas Howard has threatened to take a crack at it over the years.

Because of the world we live in, a remake of Flight Of The Navigator seems all but inevitable. To be honest, I don’t think that’s an inherently terrible idea. This is a good movie but it isn’t such an unassailable classic that nobody else should ever be allowed to touch it. But if/when it happens, I hope whoever makes it doesn’t overthink it. This movie is like a good omelet. All you need are a few simple ingredients. Anything else is just showing off and ruins the whole dish.

VERDICT: Disney Plus