Flight of the Navigator: Extraterrestrial Pee Wee

When a famous creator passes away, it's normal to reflect on their body of work, and Paul Reubens has a lengthy list of credits to appreciate. Out of all the projects Reuben's completed during his six decades as a comedian, one of my favorites is Flight of the Navigator. While he may only be in a fraction of the film, his sequence as Max, who is some type of alien artificial intelligence, is the most exciting and captivating. Max is one of the most memorable characters in Disney's live-action film history, and he makes The Flight of the Navigator a film that so many children like me from the 80s and 90s remember fondly. 

Disney had a lot of options when it came to voicing Max. The tone of the film up to the point when David initially boards the ship is dark and mysterious, and they could have continued in that direction by using a robotic, HAL-like voice. They also could have used something warm and friendly, such as a pleasant woman's voice or a grandfatherly intonation. Instead, the studio hires Paul Reubens to basically do Pee Wee Herman. The choice is brilliant. It represents a sharp turn in the film's tone that relieves a lot of tension and gives the ship a strong personality that David can play against. 

Reuben's performance of Max is complemented by the film's special effects, which while not amazing, are good enough to let the audience suspend its disbelief for the final forty minutes. Seemingly decent visual effects may not be impressive when watching a fuzzy CRT television from the 80s or 90s, but the film's visuals hold up really well on modern HD screens with high-def resolutions. The teardrop, chrome ship flies gracefully through water, air, and space, and the inside has slick features and intuitive controls that would make sense for an advanced lifeform, or AI, to have. 

Flight of the Navigator successfully avoids all the family movie pitfalls that will plague Disney's projects going forward. The gluttonous fat kid, unnecessary mobsters, forced love interests, and pointless conflicts would all start appearing regularly in the studio's scripts just a few years after the film's release. It would also stray from sci-fi and fantasy genres to more films based on sports and holidays. This wouldn't be a good thing. 

While Disney's output of films in the 1980s is somewhat frowned upon until the release of The Little Mermaid, its live-action family films from the decade represent some of the best in its catalog. In addition to Flight of the Navigator, you have Tron, Never Cry Wolf, and The Legend of Natty Gan, all of which have generally positive reviews. You also have dreck like Popeye, which is one of Robin William's most regrettable performances, but you can't expect perfection from an outlet the size of Disney. Let's hope the producer will have the insight and restraint in the future to create more family movies like Flight of the Navigator. 

Richie Rich: McDonald's In Your House!

The 1990s was the decade of the child actor, and its quintessential star was Macaulay Culkin. From a very young age, Culkin performed alongside some of Hollywood's biggest names, including Tim Robins, Katherine O'Hara, Ted Danson, John Candy, and Joe Pesci. While no film in his young career matched the explosive success of Home Alone, he made big movie studios waterfalls of cash on multiple projects, and this put him in the unique position to star in several films clearly tailored to his unique magnetism. These phenomena coalesced into the final film of his early career, 1994's Richie Rich. In this Warner Brothers Family Entertainment picture, Culkin plays the role of a wealthy heir to a mega-corporation who has to battle evil conspirators bent on his killing his family and gaining control of their enormous resources. 

Culkin was no stranger to family films with themes about money and criminality by the time he filmed Richie Rich. In the previous year, he worked on Getting Even with Dad with Ted Danson, in which he plays a character who forces his father to choose between family and a bag of stolen coins potentially worth millions. While not as explicitly themed as Getting Even with Dad, two projects Culkin filmed with John Hughes, Home Alone and Uncle Buck, also explore themes about wealth and criminality.  It's important to note that these films don't depict all wealth as immoral, just illegitimately earned wealth. It's criminality that is the true evil, which is an omnipresent theme from that time. 

Richie Rich distills the theme of the wealthy being good and the criminals being the true evil into its most obvious and frank form. The Richs are portrayed as morally upstanding corporate citizens who look out for the working man, and the villains are conniving, scheming sociopaths. In the film's first act, Richard Rich, played by Edward Herrman, gives a short speech to his company's board of directors saying, "I've never fired a man, and I'm not about to start now." Richie inherits similar values, empathizing with the families in one of the company's factories and doing everything he can to save their jobs. The core conflict of the film has Richie protecting his own wealth while simultaneously protecting his friends from physical harm and their families from financial loss, literally tieing the well-being of working-class people to the righteous rich. 

John Laroquette plays the main villain in Richie Rich as the vaguely European, too lazy to even be called a pun, executive named Laurance Van Dough. He devises a plan to kill the Rich family and steal their wealth, which he believes is contained in a giant vault within Rich Manor. Of course, Richard Rich's technical prowess and extreme competence, along with some help from his son, allow him to foil the plan. Ultimately, Van Dough falls to his death from a precipice on Mount Richmore after trying to kill the Riches yet again and failing. Yes, the good guys here are the ones carving their faces into the side of a mountain. 

Richie Rich was a moderate success a the box office and a big money maker in the VHS rental and sales market. Critically, however, the film received poor ratings from critics, with a few exceptions. The action and conflict between the villains and Richie aren't particularly fun, although there are some set pieces in the mansion that work to build some tense moments. The biggest problem with the movie is its moral themes, which are sort of nauseating even for an American public that is used to being fed propaganda about the virtue of rich people on a regular basis. 

Ideally, Richie Rich would have been best if it stuck its main strength: the fantasy of being a rich kid. Without the stupid villains, we could get more awesome moments like eating at a Mcdonalds' in our house, riding our own roller coaster, racing carts in the backyard, playing baseball with butlers, shooting a giant laser, and conversing with our own private scientist.  The film certainly has many of these fantasies, but I wish it would have gone bigger with them. Instead, we have to sit through a derivative tale about how it's wrong to take money that is not yours. 

Bushwhacked: Or Tenderfoot

I first saw Buschwacked in a public, pre-wide-release screening just outside Los Angeles in the mid 1990s. The production title of the film at the time was Tenderfoot. These types of screenings were common in my neighborhood since many movie production companies liked to test family films with local suburbanites before release to gauge the reaction of parents and children. Supposedly, early versions of the film had Daniel Stern's character as Marv Merchants. Yes, the Marv from the Home Alone series who threatens to murder a child multiple times.  I don't remember if Stern was named Marv or Max in the screening, but I imagine many parents would have been disturbed by a redemption story of this notorious villain. 

In the theatrical release of Bushwhacked. Stern plays Max Grabelski, just a seemingly normal guy in a leather jacket who gets in trouble with the mob and the law, not a petty thief who wants to murder children. In an effort to hide from the authorities, Max gets mistaken as a renowned mountain climber and ends up leading a group of scouts up a mountain. Lots of hijinks ensue, and Max ends up saving the kids and earning the trust of the community. There's a decently fun and funny movie here. Daniel Stern has great comedic chops and does his best to make Bushwhacked an exciting ride, but there's one aspect of Bushwhacked that's so glaring it's hard to sit through.

One of the most common crutches for filmmakers in the 1980s and 1990s was a bombastic score. To be fair, this isn't always a crutch. For example, John William's work for Jurassic Park matches and complements the stakes of dinosaurs running amok, but William's talent and project selection are second to none. In Bushwacked, the blaring horns, whirling woodwinds, and constantly crescendoing strings drown out the tension on screen. In a scene where Max is saving one of the kids from falling off a cliff, the overwhelming score is yelling at us to recognize the danger and heroic triumph of the situation, but it's unnecessary. Sometimes, the visuals are enough. 

Despite the score, Bushwack's gags and set pieces can be pretty fun, especially because Stern is able to sell them so well with his goofy body movements and contorting facial expressions. One of the highlights is a chase scene where Max begins to chop off the ropes of a bridge to cut off his pursuers. When he realizes one of the kids is still on it, instead of stopping, he continues to chop at the ropes, thinking it will motivate the scared kid to run off. It works even though it shouldn't. It's a scene I imagine the writers creating when Max was Marv, as the Max we grow to appreciate later wouldn't send a kid to their death just to save his own hide. 

Max does a great job of humiliating himself throughout the movie, and I like how the kids are able to outsmart him some of the time while maintaining how genuinely frightened they might be. The sequence where the kids figure out who Max actually is and attempt to disarm him is one of the best in the movie. The fun and exciting scenes are interspersed by general kid movie cliches, the most common 90's one being the chubby kid wanting to eat all the time. There's also the nerdy kid and the girl who proves she's just as tough as the boys. Of course, this is all framed around a story involving mobsters and money, which is a must for an embarrassing number 90s family films.