My supersonic ship's at your disposal if you feel so inclined, well all right
The Reluctant Astronaut is on Netflix Instant and can, for subscribers, be
watched within seconds of deciding one wants to watch it. I decided
so recently.
This movie is ideally watched, I think, when you are nine years
old, wildly enthusiastic about anything that has a space capsule in it,
and maybe are staying indoors because it's a rainy Saturday afternoon
in 1969. There's a fair amount of it that's meant to be funny but that
wears pretty thin if you've seen jokes before.
Don Knotts stars as a family playground ride operator, running
the kiddie spaceship ride, whose pushy, overbearing father gets him a
job at NASA and wants to know why he isn't flying when he's been there
for days. I didn't realize there was a Buzz Aldrin biography made
this far back. But through the wonders of That Wacky Space Program
Bureaucratese what Knotts's character doesn't know until he gets there
is he's been hired as a janitor. He never does manage to tell his
father.
Anyway, Knotts's character tries giving his father (and friends)
a tour, they insist on meddling with the real hardware, Knotts goes on
an accidental rocket-sled flight and he gets fired. Meanwhile, with
reports that the Soviets are proving their new fully-automated perfectly-
safe capsule by sending up a dentist, NASA scrambles to find themselves
the perfect average-naut for their new fully-automated perfectly-safe
capsule. Leslie Neilsen's character, an astronaut who really looks and
acts the part, had befriended Knotts's earlier and suggests him for the
mission, which they're throwing together in 36 hours to beat the
cosmo-dentist to the punch.
Will he be found? Will he be launched despite his crippling
fear of heights? Will he be dangling outside the command module from
the open door while the countdown is in its final seconds? Will the
zaniness of zero-gravity make Knotts's character accidentally unspool
the reel-to-reel tape with the reentry sequence on it? [1] Will our
intrepid average-naut re-spool it while mixing it with peanut butter and
crackers for some reason? Will the kiddie-ride spiel turn out to be
just perfect for timing the most on-target reentry in history? [2] Are
you nine years old, wildly enthusiastic to watch anything with a space capsule in it,
and trying to pass a rainy Saturday afternoon in 1969?
[1] Incidentally apparently proving the capsule was not ready
for prime time, I'd think, although that goes unmentioned.
[2] Based on sci.space.history discussions of the film, it's entirely the landing scene that people remember it for.
There's generous use of stock footage here, so there's some
fun to be had watching how many of the shots don't even vaguely match
up (and how the space capsule has a Tardis-like spaciousness compared
to the Apollo nosecone it's on).
And there's a fair amount of rocket-flight fan service, including
several scenes of Don Knotts tromping around Kennedy while the SA-500F
was on the launchpad. I imagine this must give us a way of dating when
that filming was done, although I don't know when it was at launch
complex 39-A (and, I assume, 39-B, though I don't actually know what its service life was like).
Anyway, Knotts's personal charm goes far, and Neilsen's carries
some of the rest of the way, but overall ... boy, I'd have loved this
when I was nine years old, but seeing it again might spoil fond memories
for those who were nine when they saw it.
Trivia: The word ``boondoggle'' came into existence in the late 1920s; the first published uses refer to the plaited lanyards created by Boy Scouts particularly at the 1929 World Jamboree of Scouts in England, one of which was presented to the Prince of Wales, and another which was presented to Lord Baden-Powell. Source: Webster's Dictionary of Word Origins, Editor Frederick C Mish.
Currently Reading: The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation, Frank O'Brien.