An awesome Disney movie from the 80s. A kid is accidentally transported into the future by a sentient alien spacecraft. Watch the movie if you haven't, I don't want to give out any more spoilers. It was one of my favorite uses of computer generated imagery from that time. The spaceship could change shape and become streamlined for high speed travel. I can't wait till they release this gem on DVD. And this movie also introduced me to the Beach Boys.

This is one of Disney's better live action movies, right up there with The Cat From Outer Space.
A Walt Disney Productions film from 1986. Directed by Randal Kleiser. Written by Mark H. Baker, Michael Burton, and Matt MacManus. Players: Joey Cramer, Paul Reubens, Veronica Cartwright, Cliff De Young, Sarah Jessica Parker, and others.

Take off on the ultimate fantasy adventure

The year is 1978, David Freeman (Joey Cramer), a 12 year old boy goes missing. Eight years later, 1986, David reappears, but hasn't aged a bit and he doesn't remember anything that happened after the night he went missing. The same night David reappears a UFO crashes and is found by the government.

It has been a long time since I've seen this movie. I believe Sarah Jessica Parker's character is a young girl that helps David escape a few situations and helps him in trying to figure out what happened. I remember the spaceship being pretty bad ass. I remember eagerly awaiting the movie, and remember not being disappointed by it.

The *really* interesting thing about Flight of the Navigator was the concept that the boy did not age (well, he did, but an undetectable four hours) because the majority of his 8 missing years were spent travelling at (or near) light speed! Of course this was due to the time dilation experienced by matter travelling near C, as explained in the Special Theory of Relativity. Pretty heavy concept for a kids' movie to be based on. To be honest though, I can't remember how explicitly this was addressed in the movie. And of course they kind of copped out, letting him go back in the end... I suppose tachyons were somehow involved...

Addendum: According to the "Relativity Calculator" (http://www.1728.com/reltivty.htm) the Navigator's travel speed was 0.9999999983710723 * C, or 299792.45751165977 km/sec. That's assuming that the ship accelerated instantaneously (a dubious prospect) and maintained the same speed afterwards.

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