From Flight of the Navigator to bank robber: the ruin and redemption of a Disney child star

In May 2016, headlines surfaced online that rightly shocked film fans of a certain age – former child actor Joey Cramer, star of Flight of the Navigator, had been charged with bank robbery in Canada. Seeing the headlines – accompanied by a gaunt mug shot – it was easy to write off Cramer, then 42 years old, as just another child star gone off the rails and onto the scrapheap.

I was guilty of having that exact thought, and hovered over the story for a second longer than usual. For me, like millions of Eighties kids, Flight of the Navigator still packs an imagination-zinging punch. Released in 1986 – in the wake of ET, Back to the Future, and The Goonies – the Disney-produced film has that uniquely Eighties, Spielberg-esque spirit: a kids’ fantasy adventure through time and space, with an all-American family at its heart.

The plot has 12-year-old David Freeman (Cramer) falling into a ditch and clambering back out to find that eight years have passed. David hasn’t aged a day – his parents have been searching for him since 1978; his little brother is now his big brother. NASA scientists discover that David’s brain has been programmed with never-before-seen star charts and alien lingo. So David hops aboard a recently-captured UFO and attempts to navigate it home.

Fans will agree that a special kind of nostalgia exists within the Flight of the Navigator ship – a shimmering silver cockpit, with a robot pilot named Max and a collection of mini aliens. Just as David attempts to travel back to 1978, Flight of the Navigator – now available on a brand new, features-packed Blu-ray – somehow transports Eighties kids back to a specific point in childhood.

Documentary filmmaker Lisa Downs is similarly sentimental about watching the film as a child. “I was so obsessed,” she laughs. “I was desperate to be abducted by aliens.”

In 2020, Lisa released Life After the Navigator, a moving documentary about both the film and Joey Cramer himself. She first contacted Cramer while he was serving his sentence of two years less a day. The documentary became a bracingly honest account of Cramer’s battles with drugs, crime, and child stardom. Opening up has become part of Cramer’s recovery process.

“Something that I’ve learned, that I try to share with anyone who’s going through any kind of struggle,” Cramer tells me, “is that by voicing and sharing those deep, hard things to talk about, it takes the power away – from any guilt and shame and anxiety, or fear and regret that I may have pent up – once it’s out in the open. I lived homeless. Yep! I was a drug addict. Yep! I did crime. Yep! There’s no more ammunition for people who maybe want to keep you down.”

The original Flight of the Navigator script was called “Vanished”, and was written by first-time screenwriter Mark H. Baker. The idea, says Baker in Downs’s documentary, “came from a dream”.

It went through several other writers. “Apparently there were 21 rewrites of Flight of the Navigator, which were quite different,” says Lisa Downs. At one stage, John G. Avildsen – the Oscar-winning director of Rocky – was onboard and tried to turn it into a Star Wars-style “intergalactic war movie”. Speaking on the Blu-ray, producer Dimitri Villard describes having to fire Avildsen while they were having a meeting in the Goofy Building at Disney.

Amusingly, Brian De Palma also wanted to direct – an unlikely candidate for a Disney family film. This was just two years removed from the chainsaw-revving, cocaine-hoofing Scarface. “Brian was the prince of darkness,” said Villard. “At the end of the day, we didn’t see that working.”

Instead, Randal Kleiser signed on. For Kleiser – also the director of Grease and The Blue Lagoon – Flight of the Navigator fulfilled a lifelong dream. Kleiser had wanted to make a special effects film since first seeing Charlton Heston part the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments. He wanted Flight of the Navigator to “have things that people hadn’t seen before”.

Conceptual artist Edward Eyth (who later worked on Masters of the Universe, The Rocketeer, and Hook) designed the ship and creatures. Eyth’s only instruction was that both the exterior and interior of the ship should be chrome. Eventually, Eyth suggested that the ship should be “a blob of mercury” that changes shape in flight. He also thought up the film’s most memorable visual: the ship’s back section melting away to transform into a set of floating steps.

(Once David climbs those steps and enters the ship, he’s actually in a Norweigan warehouse. The international distributors, Producers Sales Organization, had funds locked in Norway, so production moved from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to film the ship’s interior scenes in a warehouse located an hour from Oslo.)

The digital effects work was supervised by Randal Kleiser’s own brother – and computer effects pioneer – Jeff Kleiser, who had just completed work on Tron.

Thirty-five years later, Flight of the Navigator doesn’t get talked about enough as a digital effects landmark. They weren’t just creating the SFX, they also had to invent the software on-the-fly. “This was a time when we were just making it up,” Jeff Kleiser says on the Blu-ray. “We were just writing software […] There was nothing you could buy off a shelf.” Flight of the Navigator was also the first feature film to use “reflection mapping” – a frame-by-frame technique that created a realistic reflection across the body of the ship.

Randal Kleiser recalled that when he first saw James Cameron’s Terminator 2, most commonly cited as the breakthrough film for shiny, splodgy CGI, he thought, “Wait a minute, he must have seen our movie!” James Cameron later told Jeff Kleiser that Flight of the Navigator had indeed inspired the effects for the T-1000 – Cameron’s melty, metallic, shape-shifting robo-villain.

Like many Eighties films, the real magic is in the melding of computer and practical effects work. In the case of Flight of the Navigator, it was actual magic: Canadian illusionist Doug Henning helped create some in-camera effects. There were also real models of the ships made – one is rumoured to have been painted red and used to adorn a space-age snack bar in Disney World. “That’s the rumour,” says Lisa Downs. “I think it’s true…”

The ship’s robotic pilot Max – a kind of metallic eye on a stalk with a human personality – was controlled by puppeteers Tony Urbano and Tim Blaney. (Urbano and Blaney have serious Eighties credentials: they were also the team behind Johnny 5 in Short Circuit.) Max’s honking voice – “Compliance!” – was done with textbook eccentricity by Paul Reubens, aka Pee Wee Herman.

Watched now, there’s a tinge of darkness in the story: the idea that David returns home to find his family don’t live there is the stuff of children’s nightmares; its offset by a joyous kids’ wish fulfillment – zipping around in a spaceship to the sound of the Beach Boys while people on the ground look baffled. As David, Joey Cramer joins the very narrow pool of genuinely likable, non-irritating child actors.

Flight of the Navigator opened on August 1, 1986 and made a fair-but-unremarkable $18.5 million. Kleiser recalled there was an underwhelming marketing campaign from Disney, which failed to sell the film’s then-spectacular SFX action. Instead, Flight of the Navigator accrued its gem-like status through VHS and Disney Channel repeats.

“I didn’t watch the film much after,” says Joey Cramer. “It didn’t really sink in until later – actually in my twenties, when I started running into people who would recognise me. They’d say, ‘Oh my god, that movie! I loved it growing up!’”

(It’s still a TV family favourite. Has it even been a proper Christmas if you don’t manage to catch Flight of the Navigator on ITV, usually at about 9am, in the week between Christmas Day and New Year?)

Lisa Downs decided to make a Flight of the Navigator documentary after her previous film, Life After Flash, about Flash Gordon star Sam Jones (also made by Downs's Life After Movies production company). She soon discovered that Cramer was incarcerated for bank robbery.

“I remember reading Joey’s Wikipedia and being so taken by his story,” says Lisa. “For whatever reason I’d missed the headlines in 2016. I was super-excited at the thought of celebrating Flight of the Navigator, and when you read Joey’s story you just see the headlines. I thought, ‘There’s got to be a reason why this happened. How did he get from being a kid actor to ending up robbing a bank?’”

Joey was born and raised on a hippie commune in Vancouver. (Indeed, his full name is Deleriyes Joe August Fisher Cramer. “Very hippie,” laughs Joey’s mother in the documentary.) He began acting at eight years old and made his feature debut aged 10 in the Tom Selleck sci-fi Runaway. He also appeared in The Clan of the Cave Bear (starring Daryl Hannah) and the TV movie Stone Fox.

After Flight of the Navigator, Cramer turned down other films and a recurring role on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Instead, he wanted to return to a normal childhood. “The interesting thing was when I stopped doing movies and tried to go back to school, I ended up being kind of bullied and teased for being the movie star kid,” Cramer says. “It was a challenge in my younger years.”

Life After the Navigator details how Cramer started doing cocaine as a teenager and dabbled in crime, including stealing cars. He admits to binging for 13 days straight during a spring break – taking up to seven grams of cocaine per day. At one point, Cramer was trying to disconnect himself from Flight of the Navigator. A friend reminded him recently that when they’d first met, Cramer had outright denied being in the movie.

“I was like, ‘No, no that wasn’t me… what are you talking about?’” he laughs. “I’m not sure why I did that, but there were definitely points where I did try and distance myself. Looking back on it now, I don’t think it had anything to do with the film. It just had to do with underlying stuff as a person… growing up and not having an identity, trying to figure out who I am outside of the kid from Flight of the Navigator.” He adds, jovially: “Which I finally found! I know who I am!”

Cramer was homeless and went through multiple rehabs. He plummeted into heroin addiction and was in and out of prison. In the documentary, he admits that almost every time he went to jail he knew he’d be back. “They don’t make it easy to come out and succeed,” he says. “It’s just a cycle”.

He was desperate to return to a prison rehabilitation program – which led to him robbing a British Columbia branch of the Scotiabank in April 2016. Despite his disguise of a shoulder-length wig, bandana, and dark jacket, he was recognised and caught shortly afterwards.

“Something that comes out in the film is that even though I committed this crime, I just wanted to get caught,” says Cramer. “I just needed to be done, and have this opportunity to go to that program and change my life.”

The documentary came at the right time, following what Cramer describes as a lot of “self-work, growth, and trauma therapy”. Watching Life After the Navigator, there’s a disconnect between the severity of crime and who Joey Cramer is – an instinctively good-natured person. “I think there's an important message that I hope people take away,” says Lisa Downs. “There’s a human behind every headline.”

The film is also full of frank, sometimes-brutal admissions: Cramer pondering the what ifs in his life; his stealing from a young age; upsetting memories of his largely absent father; self-harming and losing all his teeth; and teary guilt over the trauma he caused the Scotiabank teller – he even wrote her an apology letter.

“There were things that I said,” says Cramer about the documentary, “that all of a sudden I was like, ‘I just put that out there for the world? OK…’ I never regretted saying that stuff.”

The documentary ends with a reunion between Cramer, Randal Kleiser, and the Flight of the Navigator cast. It's a heartwarming scene that strangely mirrors the original film – a journey back to the family. Cramer is now acting again too and enjoys meeting fans of the film.

“That’s another message from the film,” says Cramer. “It’s never too late to be who you might have been.”

Flight of the Navigator is on Blu-ray from Second Sight Films. Life After the Navigator is available from LifeAfterMovies.com.