Imagine falling unconscious in 1978 and waking up eight years later, still the same age. Your family is gone, and almost nobody remembers Starsky & Hutch. That was the starting point for Disney’s Flight of the Navigator, an imaginative sci-fi adventure set in central Florida.
Twelve-year-old David Freeman is walking home through the woods when he falls into a ravine and is knocked unconscious. David wakes up and returns home to find strangers living in his house. Somehow, the boy is still twelve, but the world has aged eight years. David finds his family, but it’s an awkward reunion, with his younger brother now his older brother and no one quite sure how to deal with David’s situation.
Coinciding with the boy’s reappearance is the discovery of a sleek silver spacecraft, taken in by NASA for study. The government also takes David in for testing, discovering a set of star charts embedded in his mind. The boy and the ship share a mysterious link and working together, both might be able to return to the homes they once knew.
Disney packed the adventure story with liberal doses of drama and comedy, as MAX (the ship) develops a taste for earth culture, boogie-ing with David to the Beach Boys. An unbilled Paul Reubens provided the voice of MAX, giving those in the know yet another reason to check the film out.
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