Friday, Feb. 18, 2011
Fort Lauderdale (Flight of the Navigator)
Flight of the Navigator is a 1986 Disney sci-fi movie about a young boy from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who falls in a ditch, mysteriously wakes up eight years into the future, and eventually hooks up with a sentient spaceship that flies him from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the atmosphere. For a certain swath of American kids born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the film's silvery Nerf-football-shaped ship is as iconic a spacecraft as the giant mother ship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A statue of Max (as the ship is dubbed) in Fort Lauderdale would make a great side trip for all the carefree young people headed just south to Miami Beach.