Flight of the Navigator: It’s Exactly as Great as You Remember From Childhood - Reactor

Flight of the Navigator (1986). Directed by Randal Kleiser. Written by Michael Burton and Phil Joanou, based on a story by Mark H. Baker. Starring Joey Cramer, Veronica Cartwright, Cliff DeYoung, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Paul Reubens.

If, like me, you haven’t watched Flight of the Navigator in thirty-some years and aren’t sure if watching as an adult will tarnish your youthful memories, let me assure you: You have nothing to worry about.

This movie is wonderful. We all remember it being wonderful when we were kids, and it’s every bit as wonderful now. It’s warm, funny, charming, and playful—overall a truly great example of a wholesome sci fi movie for kids.

That being said, I maintain that I was absolutely justified in being frightened by this movie as a child, because it is also often quite upsetting, especially in the beginning! In fact, I would argue that’s what makes the film work so well. The plot has relatively low stakes for a sci fi film and there is no real villain to speak of; it’s not the kind of movie where we believe the main character is ever really in danger. But he is still a scared kid going through an ordeal, and the emotional impact of that ordeal is effective even if we aren’t ever truly worried about him.

The story behind the film came from Mark H. Baker, who at the time was a film student at UCLA. According to Baker, the story idea came to him in a dream, and it was originally a darker, more serious tale. His idea found its way into the hands of a producers Dimitri Villard and Robert Wald, who first pitched it to Walt Disney Pictures around about 1984. Walt Disney Pictures was Disney’s newly-established live-action production division, carved out separately from the animation studio and theme parks for the purpose of attracting new audiences and hopefully drawing the company’s movie business out of the long slump it had been in since found Walt Disney had died in 1966.

Disney wasn’t sure about the film, however, so the producers took it to a company called Producers Sales Organization (PSO), which was largely a distribution company that only got into co-producing films for a handful of years in the mid ’80s. (Random trivia: This has nothing to do with this film, but PSO was in its early years a subsidiary of Arthur Guinness Son & Company, prior to Guiness’ merger with another company to form the multinational booze giant Diageo. Guinness does not fund movies anymore, but they could. If they wanted to.) The last of those movies was Flight of the Navigator, which PSO brought right back to Disney to make a co-production and distribution deal. The film industry is often very silly.

This led to a bit of push and pull between the two studios. When Disney brought director Randal Kleiser onto the project, Kleiser was given two sets of notes: those from PSO pushing the movie more toward an action film, and those from Disney pushing it more toward a family film. The House of Mouse always wins, so we got a family movie with a little bit of action, instead of an action movie with a little bit of family. I think it works out for the best in the long run, even though at the time Kleiser was perhaps not an obvious choice for a wholesome family film. His previous films included Grease (1978) and The Blue Lagoon (1980). (Is Grease a family film? I am a lifelong Grease hater, so I’m the wrong person to ask. The Blue Lagoon is definitely not a family film; Brooke Shields is the person to ask and she has quite a lot to say about it.)

Flight of the Navigator begins in 1978, when main character David (Joey Cramer) is twelve years old. He is living what appears to be a very comfortable and undramatic American life in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He has loving parents (played by Veronica Cartwright and Cliff DeYoung), an annoying younger brother named Jeff (Albie Whitaker at age eight, Matt Adler at age sixteen), and a cute dog named Bruiser (who is played by an uncredited cute dog). This brings our film club’s Veronica Cartwright sci fi movie count to three, for those keeping track at home.

Because the movie’s first scenes take place in 1978, and the Stranger Danger hysteria of the ’80s was still a few years in the future, David’s mom thinks nothing of sending him into the dark woods to meet Jeff, who is walking home from a friend’s house. David finds his little brother, but instead of going home he checks out a strange noise in the woods and falls into a ditch.

David wakes up thinking he was only unconscious for a few moments, but soon enough he finds strangers living in his house instead of his family and learns from the police that he has been missing for several years. His parents, of course, welcome him back with tearful relief, but the adults don’t know what’s going on and refuse to explain much. It’s up to his brother, now sixteen, to fill David in on what happened when he went missing.

Rewatching this part of the movie as an adult I have decided: I was right. As a kid, I was right to find this distressing. This is a genuinely terrifying situation for David to be in!

Even more, the movie wisely never shies away from that. David is scared, confused, and lost. He just wants his parents to explain what’s going on. He panics, he cries, and he wants the adults to take control. But they can’t fix things, they can’t explain it, because they don’t understand it any more than he does, which leaves everybody feeling frightened even though they are reunited. This part of the movie isn’t rushed, and while there is some humor, it isn’t defined by jokes or gags. There’s a sincerity to David’s experience that has real weight to it, and I think that is one reason why Flight of the Navigator holds up so well.

It helps that Joey Cramer does a great job in the role. Cramer went on to become an infamous cautionary tale about ’80s child stars—years of drug problems and homelessness, leading to a conviction for robbing a bank in 2016—but he seems to have gotten his life together more recently. And his troubled adult life does not take away from the fact that he really is fantastic in this movie.

Of course, David’s return happens at the same time a UFO crashes into some power lines nearby. It’s so silly, but I do love the extremely ’80s sci fi trope of presenting NASA as some shadowy government agency with infinite resources. I wish NASA had that kind of pull. In Flight of the Navigator that powerful version of NASA is represented by Dr. Faraday (Howard Hesseman), who is in charge of investigating the crashed UFO. He doesn’t make any headway until he somehow learns about the odd results of David’s brain scans. (The movie just sort of skips over how that happens.) While David is in NASA’s care, they do some more brain experiments that reveal he has information in his mind that he isn’t aware of, including spacecraft schematics and star charts.

This is, naturally, very frightening to David, even more so when he realizes Faraday isn’t going to let him go home to his family. David enlists the help of NASA employee Carolyn (Sarah Jessica Parker, in one of her earliest film roles) and a clunky robot to evade security and make his way to where the spaceship is waiting.

And what a spaceship it is! Let’s take a moment to appreciate that snarky, sentient Trimaxion Drone Ship, also known as Max. In terms of production and design, Max soars right through that marvelous sweet spot of sci fi visual effects that combine clever models, old school camera trickery, and newfangled-at-the-time computer animation. There is a lot of cool information out there about the visual effects in Flight of the Navigator. If you are interested, I recommend the forty-minute video on Captain Disillusion’s YouTube channel about all the different techniques as one place to learn more.

There were two life-size models of the ship, one with an open door and one without, both of which had to be hauled around or suspended by a special crane. Those flowing, floating steps are classic stop-motion animation, with good old fashioned hidden struts to let David climb up and down them. There were also small-scale models, both of the rounder version and the more pointed fast version. The ship’s roving eyeball was controlled by puppeteer Tony Urbano. On the set, Urbano also provide the on-set dialogue, because at the time of filming Kleiser hadn’t yet cast anybody for Max’s actual voice (you may have noticed that a different voice is also used in the theatrical trailer above).

Which, yes, seems a bit strange now, as Max ends up being voiced by Paul Reubens, also know as Pee-wee Herman, who even at the time was rapidly becoming one of the most famous and recognizable voices of the ’80s. Reubens didn’t want to be credited for his role in Flight of the Navigator; he is listed in the credits as Paul Mall. But everybody knew who it was anyway. How could we not?

The models and puppets were great for filming on set, but getting Max to fly around Florida and the world was another matter entirely. Luckily, director Randal Kleiser happened to personally know an up-and-coming CGI guy: his younger brother, Jeff Kleiser. The younger Kleiser was one of the founders of the early computer animation studio Digital Effects, Inc, which contributed some of the animation in Tron (1982). By the time Flight of the Navigator went into production, Kleiser and another programmer, Bob Hoffman, had left for a company called Omnibus Computer Graphics.

Omnibus mostly made animations for commercials, but they had the willingness and knowledge to figure out how to do what Randal Kleiser wanted for his film: a shape-shifting, reflective spaceship. They did that using reflection mapping, a method by which the image of the surroundings is projected onto the digital object. It’s much easier to do nowadays, but in the mid ’80s computer graphics for the dramatic flight sequences in Flight of the Navigator were a much more complicated task. The effects crew were working with a computer (the Foonly F1) that had roughly the processing power and disk storage capabilities of a potato; using three 50 mb disk drives, each the size of a cabinet, they could calculate and print exactly one frame at a time. Every frame took twenty minutes to render, so a clip 30 seconds long would take ten days to complete.

That’s a lot of work going into just giving a spaceship a shiny reflective surface, but it’s worth it. Because Max has a truly iconic design, and the scenes of it soaring around the world, over different landscapes and out to space and under the ocean, are wonderful.

There’s also a tonal shift in the movie at this point. It’s elegantly done, because David’s goal of wanting to go home to his family never changes, but having control of a chatty, superpowered spaceship does let him have some fun in the process. We learn that Max abducted David from Earth not for any nefarious reason, but because Max is tasked with collecting samples from planets everywhere, the cosmic equivalent of an entomologist wandering through the forest with a butterfly net. David was supposed to be returned to the moment when he was abducted, but Max is worried time travel would harm him.

The revelation that there is no ill-intent relaxes David, and it relaxes the audience too. For all the fear and uncertainty of the build-up, this becomes a film about a boy who gets to spend a day having a grand old time.

We fly along with David—and with the Beach Boys briefly interrupting Alan Silvestri’s electronic score—and figure that at some point, before long, he is going to get home. There is some lip service paid to the idea that militaries and governments notice the UFO flying around, but they never present any real danger. It’s a curious case of a film that largely deescalates the stakes in the latter half rather than raising them, and it works. David is never asked to save the world. He doesn’t have to face down nefarious villains. This isn’t the kind of children’s story where a kid has to step up and do a dangerous job because adults have failed. It’s not even really a coming-of-age story, because David’s ultimate goal is to go back to 1978. He doesn’t want to skip over his childhood in favor of something grander. He wants to go back to being a kid.

I think that’s a big part of why this film has such staying power and is remembered so fondly by those who saw it in childhood. It’s quite rare for a kid-focused movie to emphasize that a kid’s only job should be, well, being a kid. Sometimes it feels like the Disney Renaissance era that would come along a few years later, starting with The Little Mermaid (1989), has obscured the fact that children’s movies don’t have to be about growing up, and they certainly don’t have to be about defeating a terrible evil, or saving the world, or finding true (hetero) love.

Children’s films can be about a kid having a really scary time that turns into a really fun time, seeing exciting new things, making a new friend, adopting a pet, and getting home in time to have dinner with his family. That’s enough for a lovely movie that has remained a favorite for nearly forty years.

When did you first see Flight of the Navigator? How do you think it holds up now? Doesn’t flying Max around the world seem like the most fun ever?

Next week: When it comes to kids and visitors from outer space, there is one short little dude who soars on a bicycle above all the rest. Watch Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial on Netflix, Amazon, Apple, or Fandango.