No, but…
Yes! @dtolman is correct, I was looking for Disney’s Flight of the Navigator. (Though for all Disney’s willingness to slap their name on the movie and distribute it and even poach one of the spaceships for a Studios park backlog tour, this was made as an independent movie. No Disney bucks and stable of actors here, they were able to get the director of Grease to direct, his brother for CGI-adjacent effects, and the guy from WKRP in Cincinnati as the closest thing the movie had to a bad guy. Oh, and Lambert from Alien played the mother, so instead of talking to an AI named Mother who drove a spaceship, she was the mother of a kid who talked to an AI who drove a spaceship. This was as much an indie sci-fi shovelware for kids movie as Mac and Me.)
Here’s the clue breakdown:
An older brother and younger brother switch places thanks to time dilation at relativistic speeds. Also, Sarah Jessica Parker went to a Twisted Sister concert, to the protagonist’s befuddlement.
- Confusing memory and hard drive space
An alien AI probe kidnapped a 12 year old kid and jammed his head full of star maps, because the aliens heard that urban legend about humans only using 10% of our brains too.
- A Rip Van Winkle conundrum
Like Rip, David is a refugee from his own time, trapped in a future that is hostile and confusing.
- This actor used a different pseudonym this time in the credits
Paul Reubens went as “Paul Mall” instead of Pee Wee Herman for the voice of the ship. Maybe it was his “Alan Smithee”, but even as a kid we all knew it was Pee Wee.
- Round, round, get around, they get around
The kid and his ship listen to the Beach Boys as they travel across the globe. Fortunately they hadn’t gone so far in the future that the oldies station now only play Limp Bizkit and Norah Jones.
- Even a cell stocked with toys and games and a NASA hat is still a cell – and the first obligation of a prisoner kept against his will is to escape.
NASA is the monstrous organization that prioritizes finding out the truth above some dumb kid’s freedom here.
- Frisbees and a blimp float through the air like, uh, flying saucers
These show up in the opening credits. Maybe it’s foreshadowing. Maybe it is a slight indication of the passage of time, when a dog in the past can’t catch a frisbee has learned to by the time the future rolls around.
- A large freaky ululating eye
One of the sample fauna the alien had no compunctions against seizing.
Parts of the movie still hold up. The premise of “what if a kid went into a windowless white van, then later found he had more in common with his attacker and wanted to have more fun with him rather than his trauma-marked family” is still kind of weird. Parts of the movie echo in a TON of later, better movies. A speeding ship is guided by friendly fireworks, as in Galaxy Quest. A boy befriends a chrome wonder from another world after it smashes into power lines, as in The Iron Giant. A straight man not getting what someone means when they have to take a leak, as in Star Trek: First Contact. A goofy one-eyed robot dangles from the ceiling, like Gypsy in MST3K. And so on.
Pity that the child actor grew up to become a convicted bank robber.
