Trapped in my Mind

Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Popcorn Isn't Real with me, your host, Torvald, and me, your other host, Leif Ehrich. So today we're going to be talking about Flight of the Navigator. The Flight of the Navigator came out in 1986. It was directed by Randall Kleisser. He directed Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, Blue Lagoon, and Grease. What? Yeah. Blue Lagoon? Yeah. Oh my gosh. I know. You know, the Blue Lagoon parody in Top Secret, right? Oh, dude, that was a really good, good parody. And also completely out of place, out of left field. It doesn't make any sense at all.

Speaking of writhing body parts, Randall Kleiser's first directing job was a little title called Orgy Beach Party in 1964. Okay, so I'm starting to get a vision for the trajectory of his career. he started in porn he did and then he elevated to hollywood porn which is blue lagoon basically porn but and then they released it in theaters and then now that he was a hollywood director right he could get other types of jobs and he was like i guess i'll do a family film now this is very interesting max the robot i think maybe we knew this but max the robot was voiced by peewee herman by paul rubens well he does a good job at doing the serious voice he did like i mean and that's the thing is paul rubens is actually a good and prolific voice actor like he's done lots of voice acting and just a little sci-fi connection he was also the voice for rx 24 which is the robot tour guide on disney's star tours so that's cool he's got his own place in

the star wars universe and he voices robots that fly ships that's what he does yep all right so A Flight of the Navigator. It's about this spoiled rich kid in... Is he a spoiled rich kid, though? Like, he didn't seem like obscenely rich or anything. He's just a kid. They have their own boat. It's like a speedboat, dude. I mean, come on. They're not rich. They're just middle class. I don't know. They live in a really nice house that is literally right next to the ocean. This is the 80s, dude. 1978 is when it starts. So, yeah, maybe they weren't so rich back then. But now it's just like, oh, yeah, sure. You're just living right on the beach, huh? well and then when he's older they're living in kind of like a slummy cruddy right because they spent all their money looking for him no they did what what could they have spent their money on like did they buy a helicopter what do you think they did i don't it doesn't matter because it's all a

dream anyway all right all right fair enough spoiled rich kids he goes out to look for his brother he falls down a hill he hits his head and he wakes up in 1986 okay he's been missing this kid he lives next to the ocean he also lives next to like a freaking jungle with a giant ravine it's like a jungle with like vines there's some overgrown foresty areas okay i don't know all right all right get on with your your your plot so he's going to find his brother he falls down a hill he wakes up and he's he's in the future he's just been missing this whole time and then i gotta say that's a cool plot point right like no that is cool like i like that like if it was fun until a certain part of the movie like if they just start like that it's just it's like this weird unexplained mystery right like some kid disappears for like eight years comes back he's the same age i gotta say though probably not a

good choice starting off the movie with three solid minutes of dogs catching frisbees yeah and also so in this movie nasa is the fbi basically yeah we'll get into that but anyway so nasa has a spaceship that they found and it turns out this little boy is somehow connected to it and then he ends up getting into it and then they fly around and it steals his brain for a while it brings him back home it steals his brain forever right well that's true my theory is that none of that happens like with many of the theories we do return to oz phantasm this is another it was all in his head theory um you know the popcorn isn't real so you're saying everything after he fell in the ravine boom it's all in his head yeah basically did he die no he did not die he brings back an alien okay see we'll get to that don't worry okay we'll talk about the alien great okay so there are two interesting things here it was all a dream in his head because he

has head trauma he fell down a hill head trauma he had this strange dream and then he wakes up right back where he left off in that same ravine he comes back to his family right so the movie supports my theory one thing i will say though is that no matter what this has to be a prophetic dream because he prophesied 1986 really well it's exactly 1986 except also with like some robots and like you said nasa's the fbi so maybe that's a theory for the whole it wasn't a dream side of this it's true he did he did predict uh twisted sister the band yes he did i'm just gonna go through some points when he is at nasa's facility so nasa takes him to the facility to study him nasa also has this ufo at his facility in the future when nasa found that ufo a nasa security car drives up what the heck like i didn't know nasa necessarily had a security division but i mean i understand if they do but shouldn't they be securing nasa's networks and

stuff not driving around investigating spaceships what's going on perhaps because nasa was like i don't know a newer thing uh and the people writing it like writing these movies like you know they remember like the moon landing and all that stuff masa seemed really like a really big deal and so they just equated it to robots and fbi dude i gotta say that gigantic clunky stupid looking robot was nowhere near as slick and cool looking as i remembered it like that is that is a dumb looking robot it delivers mail like that's all it does and yet it's huge yeah there's no reason and it has like it can't do anything no it needs sarah jessica parker she has to be with it to pull things out of it it's a useless robot it creates a job it doesn't do anything she could just pull a cart oh my gosh but they knew who their demographic was right yeah it was little boys who like robots. I loved that robot when I was little. When he is in that facility with the

robot, at one point, I think when he wakes up, he says, he's hurt. He's calling me. Now, I think this is interesting because the boy is the one who was hurt. And I believe the ship is representative of the boy's brain. Especially if you look at the ship, it looks like a brain. And also the ship needs his brain right like to work the ship is his empty head that has been hurt right because he got head trauma no it can't work without him he is the consciousness that it needs well and like first of all a ship in its normal form it looks exactly like a brain you're right and i didn't even notice that until you said it but also yeah as the movie goes along the ship deforms which his brain may have done when it got hit right sure may have dude that's pretty interesting i did not notice that that's good another interesting part of this movie is that his family is really happy to see him but of course they have aged and his younger brother is now his

older brother yeah which i think is kind of fun that is fun i thought that was a really cool dynamic a really cool thing to put into the movie even as a kid i was like well that's weird like what if i woke up and i was suddenly your older brother but one thing his brother does say to him is he says you're probably the only sane person in this place now this is actually what most alien abductees tend to think yeah that they're the only sane person and it's all a conspiracy against it but really it's all in their head yeah okay at one point he wakes up and his brother is near him his brother says it's just a bad dream which i think you know is referring to the movie itself that's good you're saying that his brother is both like his grounding to reality trying to tell him it's a dream but also his grounding to unreality telling him you're the only sane person here yeah oh no maybe he's just part of his brain that's that's uh trying to

trying to convince him that he needs to become sane right yeah okay stay lucid so interestingly enough, at one point they bring in, I think it's some weird printouts of some weird code and they bring it to the NASA director and he's like, where did this come from? And the person says, from the mind of a 12 year old boy. The entire movie is in the mind of a 12 year old boy. That scene was really weird because why all of a sudden is this wireframe of a spaceship from David's head suddenly being printed out at NASA and presented to Dr. Faraday, which by the way, really cool name. Dr. Faraday has no idea where it came from and wasn't expecting it. When they printed that out from his head, they're doing some tests on him. And I think this goes along with your theory pretty well. They've got a bunch of stuff strapped to his head and they're analyzing his brain waves. And I think this is kind of weird because why are they even doing that?

Like all they know is that this kid disappeared for eight years and came back. Why are they specifically interested in his brain waves? What they say about his brain waves when he's he's like communicating with the spaceship and they say he's transmitting in alpha waves with complex frequency patterns in them and so alpha waves dude they're actual brain waves which i was like good job good job movie and they say they're coming in at 12.8 cycles per second which means 12.8 hertz and that actually does correspond okay to brain waves as far as i could tell online and one thing about alpha waves is they are brain waves that happen i mean they happen at different times and it can be while you're sleeping during REM cycles it can also be during uh when you're like your eyes are closed but uh you're just not really thinking about much at that moment okay um which of course maybe that's what an unconscious person would be doing also they think that alpha

brain waves are related to uh mistake prediction and so they you're thinking like he's thinking about the mistake of falling down. Right. Right. He made a mistake of falling down a cliff. And I think maybe he's transmitting an alpha brainwaves. How could this kid possibly know that? Like how could he know about alpha brainwaves to insert it into his little delusion? Right, right. I think part of this is in-universe explanation. I also think part of it is the writers giving us little hints that it was all in his head. So you're saying this is the writers telling us. Yeah, This is more of a meta clue than an in-universe clue. Cool. No, that's pretty good. One thing about that, what exactly is a complex frequency? And what do they mean he's transmitting? What are they talking about? Right. I don't think it really makes much sense. Why did they put these brainwave analysis things on his head

if they weren't expecting anything? So in that same scene, there's a nurse guy. He's staring intently at David through a window. He glances, and I mean, this is a literal, like, glance down to your right and then look away. Like, it's like if you thought you saw a shadow and you look and then it's nothing and you look away, right? Like, it's a tiny glance at a computer screen. Then he announces he's communicating directly with the computer in binary code. What do they mean by this? And how could he have known that from that little tiny glance at the computer? Like, I mean, do they mean that the EEG is reading his brainwaves and interpreting them in binary? Because that's kind of the point of the program, right? Or have his brainwaves somehow broken out of the analysis program and begun giving commands to the computer? Because that's pretty cool. Like, that would imply that he did something like maybe a stack overflow or something to break out of this program.

And that's interesting and kind of sort of realistic. I think it was two years ago, some people, some DNA sequencing researchers, they built a device to sequence DNA. They created an artificial strand of DNA which could be injected into somebody, which when sequenced would perform a stack overflow glitch on this machine to break out of its analysis protocol and start executing commands, which I thought was super cool. like they literally hacked this machine with dna and yeah that's cool they just did it to prove that hey we need to have security measures in everything even dna sequencers because what if like some organized crime unit purposefully gets somebody caught to have their dna sequenced to inject code into your dna sequencers like that's pretty dang cool and you know it could happen with brainwaves too. Like if his brainwaves transmitted certain information in a certain way to this

computer that it wasn't expecting, they could possibly put some commands into the memory of this computer, which would then be executed. A simplification of how stack overflows work. But either way, even if that's what he did, how can this guy possibly recognize that immediately? Like it should just look to him like the computer is doing random stuff. How does he know that david is communicating directly with the computer in binary code like anyway i just thought that was a really interesting thing for somebody to announce and one more line they do say i think while they're looking at all the different star charts that they find in his head they say oh my god this kid's head is full yes um which i think is another just another reference to his brain and the fact that it's damaged yeah well i mean the whole point of this movie is that his brain is damaged right like even in universe here's uh i think a really compelling evidence

for it was all in his head so he is at the nasa facility and there is a two-way mirror that the guards can watch him through in his room yeah and he goes up to it and he starts screaming at it and banging on it he says i want out of here right now you think i don't watch television and then he says wake up now he says all of the above as he stares at himself in the mirror he's literally yelling at himself to wake up so you think that he didn't know there were guards behind that mirror i think this is another more meta clue like obviously maybe the explanation is that he thinks the guards behind the mirror are sleeping and that's why he's saying wake up but other like I don't think it makes a lot of sense for him to just shout, wake up right after you think I don't watch television. No. Right? Like that's weird. It doesn't exactly follow. I think that line was inserted in there as another hint to tell us that,

hey, this kid is unconscious because he fell down into a ravine. Okay. That's cool. When he first arrived at NASA and they show him to his bedroom, it's full of like toys and GI Joes and stuff. And I was always very jealous of this scene as a kid. i was like man why can't someone show me to a room full of cool toys like that would be like my dream come true but i thought it was really funny the only things that dr faraday feels are cool enough to point out to david are the remote control wand and a cap that says nasa that's all there's like toys and electronics and all kinds of cool stuff but he's like look at this a boat and a hat the guy writing the script probably didn't know all the things the prop department would fill the room with it's true but i mean i just thought it was funny that out of all the interesting things in that movie he picks like the most banal things like the least

interesting things he could have picked and also interesting david loves that hat like he takes it and wears it all the time like it was interesting to him dude by the way when that hat gets eaten could that not be representative of something kind of like taking a bite out of his head right well the max the spaceship literally says that could have been your head and this kid like has barely survived and probably could have crushed his whole head but you know he's only got a little bit of brain damage there you go that's what i thought right so david gets to max the spaceship so that robot takes david to the spaceship i don't know you'll have to tell me what you thought but i know that i thought as a kid that sarah jessica parker had sent ralph to pick up david and take him out yeah because he just had a conversation with her about how he's trapped there also wow sarah jessica parker like he's like hey i'm trapped here i'm supposed to go

home but they won't let me and she compares this kid literally being held against his will to her dad moving to a new base when he got new orders she's like you think you got it bad every time my dad moved i'd have to make new friends like wow sarah jessica parker geez to her credit though she does help him escape yeah but did she though because watching it now it seemed very clear to me that the ship sent ralph to pick up david he calls to david and says get in the ralph unit when it entered the room well sarah jessica parker for the rest of the movie acts like she helped yes that's the thing she acts very conspicuous and i think in our version like we had a version that was like taped off the tv i think we couldn't hear the the computer talking to david during that scene because i don't remember hearing anything during that scene i just remember the robot coming in he looks at it and then gets into it that ralph unit then takes

him to the building housing the alien spaceship and they just let it in what possible business could that robot have in that room like delivering a little boy why is it authorized to go in there there's no possible reason that that robot could need to ever go in there well they don't have cell phones right they can't text each other like they need a way to send messages to even people in that building you know yeah but that robot is a bad way to send messages it needs someone to come with it to take the messages out of it also like if all it does is deliver like letters it doesn't need to have a compartment large enough to fit david i mean i guess it delivers food and i think that's why it has that big compartment so you can have like multiple trays of food in it but i don't know okay i just don't understand why that ship would need to get into the ufo room so we've already talked about how the ship is shaped like a brain yeah also so the brain is powerful but it

needs a consciousness to give it commands and control it right just like this ship is powerful but it needs david to give it commands and control it yes also when he gets inside the ship max tells him your species uses only 10 of your brain so we filled it up with star charts to see what would happen and then he says that he crashed and his star charts were erased and i think that this is kind of like he purposefully equates the brain being filled with star charts and then talks about how his star charts were all erased i think that's saying like erasement of star charts is equal to memory being erased right brain being damaged stuff like that when that ship starts taking off or like when they sorry they notice the ship is open the guards then say like they pick up the phone and say seal all doors activate penetration recording activate all radiation surveillance consoles one through 20 switch control monitors to automatic none of that meant anything

what's penetration recording why are we activating that sorry i just loved the quote-unquote techno babble that they had these guards yell because i couldn't derive meaning from any of it none of it was any sort of security lingo i mean penetration is like you can be a penetration tester but that has nothing to do with what's going on here i thought it was very irresponsible of the felonians or trimaxians i don't know what they are they're from planet felonia but they're called trimaxians i guess it was very irresponsible of them to kidnap a random kid from another planet and then just be like hey how much can we put into his brain until it explodes like what kind of a test is this this is just a horrible way to derive any information and why do they need to know that unless they're like hey we can use humans as storage devices it's because they actually represent an accident that happened to him

they're just a mean force that's damaging his brain he got one of the aliens from the a place called the pixar elliptic yep which i think is weird because pixar didn't even exist back then no they probably just picked a random cool sounding word just like pixar did when they named their company okay so my next and i think one of the biggest evidences is at one point they are trying to go back so they're trying to get back to david's house david doesn't know how to get back to his house right the max blames it on david not even knowing how to like get to the gas station or something like that but like he lives in a new house of course he wouldn't know how to get to his new house that where his family now lives no anyway so anyway at one point they stop by a convertible full of like kids who are listening to music and they ask them for directions on how to get where they're going and i just think it's interesting that the lyrics that play on the

radio when they are talking to those kids the lyrics that we hear is a song and it sings trapped in my mind oh dude okay so just a quick question how likely is it that that song was purposefully picked not only that but that it starts playing at a specific part of the song to send a message to the audience how likely is that like it's a background song in a scene do you think anyone would actually look that deep into it or would they just be like hey we got the rights to this song so play it i would say it's extremely likely because well i mean as a filmmaker that's what i would do i mean i've so i've been a writer but i've also been an editor and an audio editor you don't pick portions of songs for no reason everything you do you have a reason for right because that song would have been added in later like it probably wasn't playing during the scene no it wasn't they didn't have it you know they they definitely dubbed it in later yeah right

you choose it for a reason and it's playing trapped in my mind when this kid is literally trapped in a spaceship that looks like a giant brain yes so i feel like that is not a coincidence so as it turns out this song is actually called trapped in my mind and it was composed by david katay and guy moon and it was performed by david katay specifically for this movie a full version of the song does not exist. Only this one little snippet that says, trapped in my mind. Someone wanted, was telling, was sending us this message, trapped in my mind, as this kid is literally trapped in a brain shaped spaceship. And the song that they could have gotten if they just paid for one was The Cure's A Man Inside My Mouth, which supposedly trapped in my mind is an obvious parody of that song wasn't obvious to me but um i don't know that song but uh i regardless of whatever a man inside my mouth is they changed the lyrics to trapped in my mind and that is a that is that is

a deliberate choice and i think i think that you know david katay talked to randall klyser randall klyser told him what the film was really about and so david katay wrote and performed this song that's that's uh that's pretty interesting i think that's good evidence and then anyway so david goes to his home he's able to find it because his brother shoots off fireworks which is actually the same box of fireworks that david had in his room eight years previous why they kept around eight year old fireworks for that long i don't know but his brother shoots off what looks like bottle rockets but when they explode they're definitely aerials yes and also like it's an artillery like it shoots off multiple of them i mean not not never when we see it up close but whenever we see it from the navigator's point of view it's it's shooting off fireworks like crazy also right dude david's brother is so freaking cool he's so dedicated he's like dude i'm he's a

very good brother he's like i'll burn down the whole house if i have to well i mean i think it's a even if this is all in his head i think that his brother is a good character right because he's been feeling guilty dude david loves his brother he sees his brother as like the ultimate hero well he sees his brother as feeling guilty for causing his accident right and needing to make up for it yeah right so in david's mind it's his brother's fault and his brother's got to make up for what he did that's true and he does you know he really comes through max did the mind transfer with david and then immediately starts talking and acting like a complete idiot at which point david says you sound just like a human which she does not no so yeah do we have to discuss that part because that's where the movie that's where the movie gets horrible because it was a fun movie it's like unwatchable at that point variable oh david was not in any way a silly or crazy or spastic

no it's like he was a serious it's like your main criticism you has had of shazam yeah it was shazam Like, adult Shazam acts nothing like Kid Shazam. Kid Shazam is, he's like a very... A brooding... Yeah, brooding, like, low-key kid with lots of problems because he's like a foster kid and has had a rough life. Whenever he's Shazam, he's a crazy kooky. I'm a kid. Oh, let's make funny jokes and sing about lightning with my hands. What an adult would think to do if they were pretending to be a kid. And did you have any reason that Max would act like that? Like, does that represent anything? I, you know, maybe that could be just Max's brain just going crazy. So he's breaking down at this point, like Jinx from Space Jam. When he gets back to his house, his family want him to stay, right? But the thing is, he's still eight years in the future. And he says, if I stay, the scientists would treat me like a guinea pig for the rest of my life.

And I think that what he's saying is, like, if I stay in this ravine, in this coma, I'll be, like, at a hospital for the rest of my life, right? Okay. He needs to come back. He needs to wake up. Well, right, right. But, like, I'm just saying, like, he doesn't even know he's still in the ravine, but, like, he's in a coma, right? And if he stays in the coma, you know, doctors are going to treat him like a guinea pig for the rest of his life. Yes. Well, so they go back in time. Now, I think just visually, when they go back in time, it's interesting that what they fly through is like a black plane above and below and a bunch of little electrical neurons going between them. Yeah. I think it kind of looks like, you know, how you might depict the neurons of a brain. also he sees into the robot's head he sees its brain which is boiling it's just a boiling brain bubbling and fizzing and frothing like i thought that was interesting anyway dude that robot is so

irresponsible like he's willing to potentially vaporize david for no reason like david can live in the future this could kill him like why is the robot even willing to go along with this So after they go back in time, he wakes up in the same ravine and he just gets out of it and he goes and he meets his parents and they go on the boat. They don't know that he has had an injury, right? He doesn't tell them. He should tell them. Like that was, that was no joke. And then at the very end, he still has an alien on his shoulder and I think, or in his backpack. Yeah. And I think this represents the fact that his brain is still very damaged because he did not get any treatment. Okay. So did he die or did he wake up as we saw? Just like an hour later or less. He woke up as we saw. It was all just a brain damage hallucination. Okay, cool. I mean, I think this is very different from other theories that you say might be all in their head.

Like this is nothing like Return to Oz or Phantasm. I think there's really good evidence. Like we know that this kid fell down and got hurt. And he wakes up exactly where he was to begin with, you know. And then after he gets hurt, everything's weird and doesn't quite make sense. And there are a lot of references to brains and brain damage, right? And then, of course, like you said, he wakes up in the exact same place at the end and goes back and things are just a little off. I think that there is really good evidence that this kid hurt his brain and his brain is trying to tell him that. So that's good. And it's a good theory. And I think it takes a movie, which unfortunately became a very bad movie towards the end, and makes it more interesting. It makes it more watchable. Everything related to NASA in this movie makes zero sense. No, it makes no sense. I think the process is because this kid knows nothing about NASA.

No, it's a good theory. I think it's really interesting. All right. Well, this has been The Popcorn Isn't Real with me, Leif Eric, and my brother Torvald. And we are signing off. Music for this episode was provided by Christine. And we'll see you next time.

*crickets*