First Witch Mountain, now Flight of the Navigator, Disney is on a mission to ruin all the fun movies from my childhood. That’s right, Disney is remaking the 1986 sci-fi movie Flight of the Navigator.

The good news is that Grounded for Life/My Name is Earl/Arrested Development writer Brad Copeland is writing the script.

The bad news is that Copeland’s only feature film credit was the horrible middle America comedy Wild Hogs.

John Hyde, who executive produced the first one, will return in the same role for the remake.No director has been hired.
The original movie told the story of a 12-year-old boy named David who is abducted by an alien spacecraft in 1978, and returned to earth a few hours later. But due to the time dilation, it is eight years later on Earth. Here is a retro trailer:

The film was a small hit when it was released in the summer of 1986, but later became a cult classic on television and home video. Navigator is also notable for being the world’s first 35mm feature film to use environment mapping and composer Alan Silvestri’s entirely electronically generated score. The film also featured Sarah Jessica Parker and Paul Reubens as the voice of Max, the robotic pilot of the alien ship.

What are the chances that Disney is not going to screw this up? I’m not saying the original movie was great — I’m sure a lot of my affection for the film has to do with the childhood memories associated with it, and not the actual film itself. The same could be said for Witch Mountain and Disney’s recent redo missed the point completely. And I fear that a new Flight of the Navigator film would be all about a computer generated alien ship, the annoying robot pilot character at the wheel, and might forget much of the real sci-fi drama that made the original so damn cool (at least, at the time).

Lets just hope that Jaden Smith isn’t cast as the main character.

source: THR