A 1967 American comedy film produced and directed by Edward Montagne that follows a carnival ride operator (Don Knotts) who is hired as a janitor at the Space Center in Houston and gets sent to space.
The movie also stars Leslie Nielsen, Joan Freeman, Arthur O Connell, Frank Mc Grath, Paul Hartman, Jeanette Nolan, Robert F Simon, among others.
It was released on June 16, 1967.
Tropes for the film:
- Accidental Astronaut: Roy Fleming (Knotts) plays an astronaut a the local fairground. He gets work as a janitor at NASA, but mistakenly gets shut into a space capsule and fired into space.
- Bureaucratically Arranged Marriage: The titular character has a hastily arranged marriage so he and his bride can become the first married couple on the Moon.
- Phony Veteran: The hometown hero at one point admits to Roy that he was never a soldier like he claimed: he was a librarian, and even his "war wound" was just the result of an on-the-job injury. Since Roy has inadvertently been trumped up as an astronaut even though NASA simply hired him as a janitor, this amounts to Oblivious Guilt Slinging.
