I would really love to sit in on some of those meetings they have in Hollywood, you know the ones that seem to always end in the announcement of yet another sequel, or a completely unnecessary remake of a perfectly good film. Recently Disney announced that they will be remaking Flight of the Navigator. I would have to put Flight of the Navigator up there with The Wizard, Transformers the Movie(The Animated One) and The Monster Squad as some of my all time favorite childhood movies.

More after the jump.

Flight of the Navigator if you haven’t seen it is the story of David an eight year old boy who while out playing on the fourth of July in 1978 falls into a ditch and wakes up 8 years later in 1986. Everyone else on Earth has aged eight years, but David is still physically twelve years old. Later we find out David was abducted by aliens and taken to their home world. While with the aliens David is gone for only a few hours, but due to faster-than-light travel, when he is returned it is eight years later in 1986. While dropping him off the space ship hits a power line decommissioning the ship before it can return him to his proper time stranding him in the future. The film turns into your normal kid type adventure movie when David has to not only save the aliens ship that abducted him from NASA but get back to 1978 as well.

See my point is even though I fondly remember Flight of the Navigator, it really wasn’t that great of a film and the fact the Hollywood has resorted to remaking its second and third tier titles says that they are fundamentally out of ideas. I almost understand the fact that times are tough and they would rather remake old movies that have a tried and true formula, than take a chance on untested fare but where do we draw the line? I think the only thing that will work is when people actually stop going to see them, but with the prices of movie tickets I think the theater goers are trapped in the same vicious cycle as the studios.