I harp on it a lot, but I’m fascinated by that period of time when Disney made kids movies that were also terrifying. The Watcher in the Woods, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The Black Hole were all made in the ’70s and ’80s and were just straight-up scarring. Even ones that seemed outwardly benign were majorly troubling. One of these was latter films was 1986’s Flight of the Navigator about a kid on an adventure with a sentient alien spaceship. According to Variety, that movie is being remade by Lucifer showrunner Joe Henderson.

Now first thing’s first; Variety calls this project a “reboot.” This seems pretty odd to me considering Flight of the Navigator never got a sequel, it wasn’t a franchise, and didn’t do all that well at the time. A 30-year-old movie being made a second time is in my book called a remake, not a reboot. Whether this was a typo on Variety‘s part of the official language being used by Disney is not yet known, but it’s certainly a head-scratcher if you ask me.

The original movie starred 12-year-old Canadian actor Joey Cramer as David Freeman, a regular kid who gets taken aboard a highly advanced alien spacecraft–with a mobile AI named Max voiced by Paul Reubens—in order to be the navigator to help bring Max and his alien creatures back to where they need to go. It’s a fun little adventure in which David teaches Max about humans through pop culture and the music of the Beach Boys. However, when he comes back, even though he feels like he’s only been gone a few hours, he’s in actuality gone for 8 years (a round of applause for the scientific concept of time dilation).

…This is an INCREDIBLY dark concept for a kids movie. His family thought he disappeared and when he returns, he’s younger than his older brother. They don’t believe he’s been where he says he’s been, so they turn him over to a shady government science and intelligence facility. He needs a young Sarah Jessica Parker to help him escape and get back to Max. It is a traumatizing movie, or was for me as a child.

At any rate, someone who makes a show about the devil being a private eye seems like a good choice to remake this movie. And if it means a semi-return to the dark side of Disney, I’m all for it. But, oh man. At what cost!

What do you think of a remake/reboot/rewhatever of Flight of the Navigator? Let us know in the comments below!

Image: Disney

Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. He writes the weekly look at weird or obscure films in Schlock & Awe. Follow him on Twitter!

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