Trivia / Flight of the Navigator

• Creator Killer:
  • Producers Sales Organization never made another film after this.
  • Omnibus would shut down operations to all their branches outside the one in Japan shortly after the film's release upon buying out Abel & Associates.
• Deleted Scene: According to the original script, after David returns back to his present time, he was meant to see a younger Carolyn. Photos from Japanese promotional material in the 1986 program pamphlet confirm this scene was shot, but cut from the final film due to overall running time.
• Dueling Works: With Explorers (even though Explorers came out the year before).
• International Coproduction: between the USA's PSO and Norway's Viking Film A/S (the scenes inside the spaceship filmed in Norway).
• Prop Recycling:
  • A non-film example. One of the iconic spaceship props was repurposed in Walt Disney World, remodeled as a cute little red rocket, and stands atop the Cool Ship food kiosk.
  • Within the film itself, a giant eye can be seen among the creatures abord the ship. This was the only one not made from scratch and instead was on loan from CBS's prop department.
• Troubled Production: According to Captain Disillusion (and others), the (for the time) cutting-edge CGI work was done using the Super Foonly F-1, a completely unique one-of-a-kind supercomputer based on the PDP-10 mainframe and required a secondary mainframe, a DEC VAX-11, to act as a control host, and which had previously been used for some of the CG in TRON. This machine was by the standards of the day rather powerful, but it barely had enough memory for the animation frame currently being rendered and the one being printed to film. A 30-second animation sequence would take a full 10 days of computation and printing to complete. The Foonly was also an extremely balky prototype that suffered continuous technical problems and glitches. The most severe of these was when the system's RAID array suffered a head crash in the middle of one of those 10 day rendering runs, completely destroying the drives (and these were huge things that resembled a top-loading washing machine!). All data was lost, the drive heads were toast and it happened on a holiday weekend so there were no service technicians available to replace them. Once the drives were functional again, the software stack had to be reinstalled from scratch, which itself was a pretty fraught operation given that the system was effectively a pre-production prototype, and had to be done from tape and took days to complete. Then the lost rendering run had to be restarted. The system's custodian had the following to say about this:
  I remember about a three day period when I would drive home and try to sleep for a few hours only to drive back and try to get running again. The really awful thing was that I kept seeing big billboard signs on the way in advertising Flight of the Navigator, saying "coming next week!". "We hope!" I would mutter to myself.
  • Also according to Captain Disillusion, the supercomputer actually had three hard drives[1]- a standalone 50MB holding the OS, and a further two 50MB configured as a RAID-0 striped array for temporarily storing the renders^note A configuration which any competent sysadmin would tell you is a huge no-no for critical production work, the array should've been configured as RAID-1, or mirrored. The above note would mean that the OS drive failed with at least one of the drives in the array, although more realistically, it could be that all three drives were completely trashed.
  • Also according to Captain Disillusion, Strangely averted with the PFR-80 film recorder that the supercomputer uses to transfer it's renders to film- there has been horror stories about film getting jammed in the machine with past renders, and the jam not being discovered until the render was supposedly complete. However, to the producers' relief, this did not happen during the rendering of Flight of the Navigator.
• What Could Have Been: There was meant to be a subplot where Max's masters on Phaelon were angry and sought to destroy their Trimaxion Drone Ship after it had not only failed to return after its research mission, but also deemed it a rogue AI having downloaded a copy of David's memories and personality into its databanks.

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