Hacker Cinema
Flight of the Navigator
1986 · Film · 90 min
Directed by Randal Kleiser
FamilyScience FictionAdventure
12-year-old David is accidentally knocked out in the forest near his home, but when he awakens eight years have passed. His family is overjoyed to have him back, but is just as perplexed as he is that he hasn't aged. When a NASA scientist discovers a UFO nearby, David gets the chance to unravel the mystery and recover the life he lost.
10 positive2 mixed6 neutralfrom 18 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
19 comments on Hacker News
There have been a few movies that each revolutionised CGI in their own way. The Last Starfighter, flight of the navigator, tron, jurassic park, toy story, Terminator 2
For Flight of the Navigator (1986) they sent renders of the ship directly to film because the system could only hold one frame at a time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyixMpuGEL8
I know some may will decry it for what it stands for, but I think this is great for edge case mitigation, imagine civilization games where you can use flexible strategies mimicking real life, versus following programmed decision trees. Gameplay that is responsive to environmental destruction, agent cores in the console that are constantly scheming against you. If done right, we can continue to do new and innovative things. One can get bogged down by the bad 3d animation out there, or marvel at what Pixar and before it, films like "Flight of the Navigator" and "Terminator" did.
Not sure about Tron but here are a few details [1] about the Foonly F1 used on that film and how it was later used for Flight of the Navigator:
> They had pushed for Triple-I to build the DFP, the first (that I know of) high-resolution digital film printer for motion pictures. This was the next generation PFR, using an 8" CRT which had fast-decaying phosphors so that it could be used for scanning in film (using photomultiplier tubes built into a special camera) as well as printing. The imagery was amazing
> Since the Foonly only had enough disk storage to hold the frame being computed and the frame being printed, the numbers worked out like this: 30 seconds of film at 24 frames per second works out to 720 images each computed and printed at 6000 x 4000 pixels.
[1] http://dave.zfxinc.net/f1.html
Revenge of the Ninja
All the Chuck Norris movies
All the Schwarzenegger movies
Goonies
Flight of the Navigator
Revenge of the Nerds
Sideways
Back To The Future
Cinema Paradiso
Spaceballs
Up In Smoke (Cheech & Chong)
The Incredibles
Indiana Jones 1-3
Indiana Jones: Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (Rifftrax only)
Falling Down
Office Space
Man Bites Dog
Nothing To Lose
Idiocracy
Space Mutiny (MST3k)
Goodfellas
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Groundhog Day
Barbie
Full Metal Jacket
Mallrats
Flight Of The Navigator
The Founder
One Hour Photo
---
I'm pretty certain I've rewatched Sideways more than any other film.
Flight of the Navigator wasn’t a good movie then or now. It is an excellent focus for childlike wonder, however.
Captain D produces some of the most impressive technical content out there, wrapped in subtle and not-so-subtle zingers, and breathtakingly illustrated. Decomposing a frame into its brightness channel, rotating it, and collapsing the columns to make a waveform graph? Mind completely blown.
The debunk videos are his major stock in trade, but I personally love (and discovered him through) the explainers about frame rate and shutter speed, color spaces, interlacing, and other details of the video art.
And of course, his mindbogglingly detailed exploration of Flight of the Navigator -- if you've seen the film, make some time tonight and watch it.
It would be great if my kid was into the video games I was into as a kid, but I've kind of resigned myself to the fact that she's a different person, grew up in a different environment, has different expectations out of video games. You can't force someone to like something. Same with movies and music. I tried to get her into Harry Potter and Star Wars and the kid/teen movies I grew up with like The Goonies and Flight of the Navigator, but those movies just so old to this generation, and there's nothing in it for them to relate to.
It's like trying to get "11 year old me" into The Howdy Doody Show.
Effort? Nah. Whatever makes things go viral, it ain't that.
It's frustrating to hear this from Mr Beast, because he's living proof that a pile of crap videos are worth more than a single effortful one. Compare his latest video "Every Country On Earth Fights For $250,000!", uploaded 2 days ago and currently sitting at 76 million views, with VFXcool's legendary documentary on the special effects of Flight of the Navigator, uploaded 2 years ago and standing at 2.6 million views. Now I don't know how long either one took to make. But I would bet my life the the VFXcool one took longer. Much, much, longer.
I'm surprised at how often I see adults rewatching Flight of the Navigator, even though it's very much a kid's movie. Harry and the Hendersons is particularly fun to watch now if you are a Poirot fan.
Nostalgia tripping on the 1980s seems to rarely if ever include Max Headroom. To me, he was the essence of my high school zeitgeist. Maybe younger people today think he was too weird to have actually been a big deal. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6epzmRZk6UU)
"it's the stuff dreams are made of"! also, flight of the navigator is an amazing movie https://archive.org/details/FlightOfTheNavigator1986
It pretty much was just like that (I was there). One of my favorite "biographical" movies that nobody's ever heard of is Explorers:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089114/
The "More like this" section at the bottom has some other goodies, although a bit campy: Flight of the Navigator, *batteries not included, Short Circuit, Harry and the Hendersons, etc. Mainstream movies like The Goonies and The Breakfast Club are uncannily accurate. My friends and I basically rode BMXs and played Nintendo and drank Mtn Dew by the pool while REM played on the radio. We had analogs for everything today except the internet and cell phones, and much of it was actually more functional (didn't require instructions). And politics was a joke back then, like it was common knowledge that Reaganomics would dismantle Social Security and leave no money for Gen X (which hadn't been named yet) but we were rapidly heading for the 2015 Back to the Future Part II where we'd have our own fusion reactors so it wouldn't matter anyway.
Oh and my friend had a VCR that could pause without jittering, because in most models the magnetic head had to move slightly to pick up a signal from the tape. My other friend had access to a Video Toaster (can't remember if it was at the A/V club or a local TV station) that could add words and FX. But really the best work had the smeary transitions where we pressed record. And mixtapes often had part of the radio station's jingle or missed the first few seconds of the song. Everything was a bit dreamier because we were doing original things ourselves, not watching other people do it on YouTube. That's probably what I miss most.
No, clearly the “Back to the Future” episodes were better than the “Flight of the Navigator” episode!
Missing from this list: the Foonly F1, used to create the animations in Tron (1982) and later to render the spaceship in Flight of the Navigator (1986) - of note as the first use of reflection mapping in a motion picture.
I highly recommend this video on the making of Flight of the Navigator. Apart from being highly entertaining, it also goes into stunning detail on all the special effects, in particular how exactly one goes about putting CGI into film in the 1980s (as the narrator points out - Final Cut Pro hadn't been invented yet!).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyixMpuGEL8
He has actually done a remarkable amount of voice acting: https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0000607/filmotype/actor?ref_=m_nmfm_1
I loved the 80s movie "Flight of the Navigator" where he played Max, the alien ship robot, remarkably well. You could tell it was him because Max's laugh was Peewee's laugh: https://youtu.be/fjv7k54YTa0
This is a video about the movie Flight of the Navigator (1986). Alan explains
how they made the CGI effects with all the problems caused because the computers that were not very powerful, and also all the special effect made with traditional methods.
As in all the videos of Captain Disillusion you should watch it once with a popcorn bag to enjoy it and then watch it once or twice again to discover all the special effect he used and how they illustrate the effect he is discussing.
Hollywood is almost universally terrible at hacker movies, unfortunately, dating back to when they perverted Frankenstein. I haven't seen Swordfish, but what I've heard doesn't make me optimistic.
Real Genius and Ghostbusters are two pretty good hacker movies. I hear Buckaroo Banzai is in the same ballpark, but I haven't seen the whole thing. I also enjoyed Flight of the Navigator, but it's really more about magic than about hacking.
still a few more (some are in the works)
* Stargate
* "startup.com" - about the formation of 'govworks.com' i wonder what these guys think about Obama.
* Takedown - 'Kevin Mitnick's story'
* Serenity
* Star Trek: the Voyage Home
* The Last Starfighter
* Johnny Mnemonic
* Short Circuit 1 & 2
* Crest of the Stars (anime)
* Fahrenheit 451
* Equilibrium
* Batman (begins, dark night, the tim burten one)
* Edward Scissor Hands
* Space Balls
* Avalon ( http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/movie/decade/2000-current/avalon/#comments)
* LAIN: The Serial Experiments (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Dune
* Ender's Shadow (in the works)
* Ender's Game (in the works)
* Diamond Age (in the works for sci-fi, 'a young girls illustrated primer')
* The Arrival
* The Terminator 1,2,3
* The Sarah Conner Chronicles
* D.A.R.Y.L
* Flight of the Navigator
* Explorers
* AI
* Batteries Not Included
* Blade Runner
* IRobot
* Appleseed (anime)
* Bubble Gum Crisis (anime)
* Ergo Proxy (anime)
* Virtuosity
* Metropolis (all of them are good)
* The Last Exile (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Robocop (this so hold up)
* Primmer
* Probe ( the TV series, it took me 3 months to find the copies of this Issac Asimov based TV series on ABC ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probe_(TV_series)
* Infest Wisely
* Logan's Run
* Planet of the Apes
* Star Trek: First Contact
* CQ ( if you get it, you'll get why this is a hacker movie , 'la resistance')
* Amelie
* 2046
* Trigun (anime)
* Escaflone (anime)
* Tank Girl
* Twelve Monkeys
* THX 1138
* Bicentennial Man
* The Philadelphia Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philadelphia_Experiment_(film)
* Seaquest ( some episodes )
* Strange Days ( new yeas hacker style )
* Freejack