This is a Timey Wimey episode covering the 1986 Disney classic, Flight of the Navigator. Is it a good time travel story? Does it hold up after 30+ years? Listen in and find out!
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Super-short Recap
This is the one where a kid falls down in the forest and wakes up in the future! David is a normal kid with an annoying baby brother enjoying 4th of July in 1978. When he investigates a strange sound in the forest (don’t EVER do this, btw), he falls down and gets knocked out. When he returns home, he finds that he’s been missing for 8 years, though he hasn’t aged a day.
NASA scientists hear about him the same week they discover a crashed spaceship. They take him in for some tests, but something strange is happening. David’s brain is directly communicating with the computers in binary code. Weirder still, he hears a voice calling to him. He follows the voice and ends up in a spaceship that downloads his brain in order to get home and therefore starts talking like Pee Wee Herman.
Turns out, the spaceship picked him up in 1978 and flew 560 lightyears to Phaelon and back. Thanks to time dilation, this day trip lasted 8 years on Earth. Max the spaceship agrees to risk David’s certain death to get him back to 1978 and because it’s Disney, it works. Everything is back to normal, except he smuggled an alien lifeform in his backpack which PROBABLY won’t destroy the ecosystem.
The end.
Characters
- David – Joey Cramer
- Didn’t do much after this.
- There’s apparently a documentary called “Life After the Navigator” about the making of the film and Joey’s life since then. It’s in production now.
- Max – Pee Wee Herman!
- Faraday – Howard Hesseman
- This guy never stops working
- Most notably, he was Dr. Johnny Fever in WKRP in Cincinnati and Charlie Moore, the teacher from Head of the Class.
- Jeffrey – Corbin swears he was Cory on Boy Meets World. He’s not. He’s mainly a voice actor.
- Carolyn – Sarah Jessica Parker
Random stuff we noticed
- Holy CGI, Batman!
- The Trimaxion Drone Ship was done in CGI by Omnibus Computer Animation.
Time travel details
Method
- ALIENS!
- Flying through an electrical storm?
- This one was different than most stories we’ve covered. This one seems to focus on the present. The only reason time travel is even introduced is to cheat the time-dilation of light speed travel.
Rules
- It could kill you.
- Can you change the past?
Where was the time travel type introduced?
- It wasn’t really talked about.
Things they got Wrong:
Did they follow their own rules?
- There weren’t really any.
Things they got Right:
- There’s an interesting theory about time travel that I came across once (citation needed). It basically says that you can’t go forward into the future and meet yourself. The reason being, you took a short cut and weren’t there for the intervening time.
- Back to the Future gets close to this when Einstein travels one minute into the future. There weren’t suddenly two Einsteins. Doc says he skipped over that minute.
- This is what happens here with David. He skipped over those 8 years (via time dilation). The only way to encounter another version of yourself is to go back in time, not forward.
Was it a good story?
- Tripp said he wasn’t sure what the take-away was. Don’t get trapped on an alien spaceship?
Was it a good time travel story?
- The boys were split on this. Corbin says yes, Braden wasn’t sure, and Tripp said no.
Crackpot theories
- Was the Trimaxion Drone Ship bigger on the inside?
Listener Input
- Dirty Scifi Buddha has been following and liking posts on our old website since December. I’m just curious who he/she is and if they know about our new site?
The Game Plan
- If you didn’t catch it already, we’re stalling for a few weeks so that we can line up with the theater release of The End of Time.
- Go to Fathom Events to find a showing near you.
- This means we’ll start the David Tennant Specials on July 28
- Things get a bit wonky here, so we’ll outline it for you:
- Planet of the Dead (Easter special)
- On Amazon Prime, this is the beginning of Doctor Who: The David Tennant Specials. The rest of these specials are included in this collection.
- The Waters of Mars (Autumn special)
- The End of Time Parts 1 & 2 (Christmas/New Year’s special)
Closing
Noobs and the Whovian is a production of Master Closet Studios, where it’s always smaller on the inside. Your Senior Producer is Austin Reason. Our Audio Engineer is Tripp Reason. Our Production Editor is Corbin Reason.
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