aka The Spaceman and King Arthur, aka A Spaceman in King Arthur’s Court

• Directed by Russ Mayberry
• Written by Don Tait, based on the book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain
• Starring
  • Dennis Dugan
  • Jim Dale
  • Ron Moody
  • Kenneth More
  • John Le Mesurier

There’s something about Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court that inexplicably tempts movie producers to make variations on it. “We’ll do it with Bing Crosby!” “We’ll do it with the youngest Cosby kid!” “A computer programmer!” “Bugs Bunny!” “Five stylish homosexuals!” (That last is the only one I made up — and when some producer reads this and immediately rushes “Queer Eye for King Arthur” into production, I expect my share of the take, dammit.)

In the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom, everyone was rushing their own space-related movies into production, and Walt Disney’s boys decided that this would be one of their entries (along with The Cat From Outer Space and The Black Hole). None of them have really become beloved family favorites, but Unidentified Flying Oddball makes The Black Hole look like 2001: A Space Odyssey. Heck, even The Cat From Outer Space comes off looking good by comparison.

“And what luck — I parked right beside a Klingon Bird of Prey!”

It all starts at NASA, where Dr. Zimmerman (Cyril Shapes), a foreign-sounding scientist in a prim beard, is explaining their latest massive undertaking to the Congressional beancounters: An ion-driven ship called Stardust, which will carry a mission to the Centauri system at relativistic speeds. (Personally, I’d consider it bad luck to name a spacecraft after particularized matter, but I’m speaking from a post-Challenger, post-Columbia perspective.) The Congressional poobah (Robert Beatty) immediately balks at the idea of sending a red-blooded American up on a fool’s errand like that, so Dr. Zimmerman goes for the obvious band-aid solution: He calls young nebbish scientist Tom Trimble (Dennis Dugan) to design an android with completely humanlike reactions so that they can use it for a crew.

Despite the fact that this kind of artificial intelligence is much more difficult than interstellar flight by several orders of magnitude (especially when it’s one person’s project, from scratch), Trimble soon cranks out Hermes, a humanoid robot who just happens to look exactly like Trimble. The mission can go forward, yay — until Hermes gets cold feet on the launch pad. Apparently, Trimble designed this artificial intelligence so well that Hermes is actually nervous about the trip. (I swear, this is an awful lot of throwaway material in order to make the main plot work.)

So Trimble goes up into the capsule to calm him down, and while there, an errant lightning bolt from an incoming storm hits the rocket — and presto! They’re launched!

“Perhaps I should have turned you into a mouse AFTER you’d completed the script!”

Not only that, but Trimble accidentally discovers an unknown facet of Einsteinian physics: Hitting the wrong button in freefall and sending the ship into a spin will actually send you back in time to the year 508 AD. And thus, our story is set up.

Trimble naturally manages to set Stardust down in England, the only place in the world where people spoke essentially modern English in the year 508 AD. Not only that, but he just manages to land within easy walking distance of Camelot. (You may be inclined to draw a comparison to Luke Skywalker’s crash landing on Dagobah, right smack-dab in Yoda’s ZIP code. But Luke had the Force on his side; Trimble only had dumb luck, bad science, and script contrivance.)

He immediately meets up with Alisande (Sheila White), a local girl who hesitantly befriends him despite his opaque space helmet. But hey, she’s tolerant in her associations; she thinks the goose she carries everywhere is her father. (When she left home, Dad was finishing his breakfast; when she got back, a goose was standing on his chair. What other explanation could there be?) And together, they blunder into the path of Sir Mordred (Jim Dale), who captures the helmeted monstrosity as a curiosity to present to King Arthur.

Helm’s Deep redux.

Trimble finally loses the helmet during his royal audience, and proceeds to bore the hell out of the good people of Arthur’s court, explaining the future history of the world between their time and his in minute detail. For this as much as for any other offense, he’s sentenced to death by fire. Not a problem for a guy with a heat-impervious space suit. Then he gets into further trouble with Mordred by telling Arthur that he saw Alisande’s father imprisoned in Mordred’s dungeon as part of Mordred’s “land grab” plot. So Mordred challenges him to a joust to the death.

Ah, the joust. If you have any fond memories of this movie from your childhood — or any memories of it at all — you probably remember the joust, in which Hermes stands in for Trimble and loses body parts on every pass through the lists. But it gives enough time for Trimble to find some documentary evidence of Mordred’s scheming to show to King Arthur. Of course, Trimble knew ahead of time that Mordred was a bad guy in Arthurian legend, so as long as he kept digging, he was sure to find something.

Unfortunately, he apparently hadn’t read the legends that said that Merlin (Ron Moody) also turned against Arthur, which means that Merlin is still around in the castle while Trimble offers to supplement Arthur’s defenses against Mordred’s revolt. Merlin just sticks around long enough to steal Trimble’s laser gun (isn’t every NASA mission equipped with one?), which will give Mordred a decided advantage.

And now, the space-age solution to anxieties about bad breath…

But in the end… well, shucks, it’s a Disney movie, so you know everything will end up all right, the good guys will prevail, the bad guys will be vanquished in a comical and pratfallish manner, and the credits will roll.

What may not be readily apparent from the description above is how lackluster it is. (The movie, I mean. It’s easy to see how lackluster my description is.) You may remember that the ’70s were a decade in which Disney was known more for its slightly goofy live-action than its animated features. Unidentified Flying Oddball shows all the signs of having been cobbled together from whatever resources were lying close at hand. We have director Russ Mayberry at the helm, whose main paychecks had always come from television work; that probably explains why he could shoot the movie at a historic castle in Northumberland and still have everything so brightly lit that it looks like a soundstage set.

Even worse is Don Tait’s screenplay. Tait was a Disney stable regular, having also given them scripts for both Apple Dumpling Gang movies, The Shaggy D.A., and Herbie Goes Bananas. He may have believed, at this pinnacle of his career, that whatever rolled off his typewriter platen would be comedic gold without any real effort on his part. Certainly, what was given to the cast and crew to bring to the screen is almost perversely without anything approaching comedy; unfortunately, it’s a script that keeps thinking it’s funny. Trimble, for example, consistently peppers his speech with 20th-century expressions and references that draw blank stares from his 6th-century audience. Did I say “peppers”? Yeah — in Cajun quantities. I mean, when he tries to express his feelings toward Alisande, he pointedly includes references to pizza, six-packs, and the Superbowl. I’m sure Tait thought he was invoking that old comedic dichotomy of a technical genius who’s clueless at interpersonal relationships, but it’s so over-contrived that the one who comes across as clueless is the one with his fingertips on the typewriter.

“I’ll turn it on, as long as you promise not to use it on my suit.”

And you really have to wonder exactly who they thought their audience was (a common problem for Disney in that decade). This was released a year before Disney finally made the break into PG-rated features, and you can feel them chomping at the bit here. How else to explain the recurring plot point of Trimble bribing a palace page (Rodney Bewes) with a copy of “Playtime” magazine, with a bikinied beauty on the cover?

Add to the mix: spaceflight special effects that Buster Crabbe would have been embarrassed to be seen with; an Arthur with all of the charisma of a Jell-O mold; and a “climactic” final battle so lifeless and ill-paced that more than one of my limbs fell asleep.

If you do have fond memories of this one from childhood, you’re better off keeping the rosy memories and not refreshing your recollection. And if you didn’t see it as a child… Well, I think you’re probably coming out ahead in your ignorance.

(A personal note: I recognized the face of “Oaf,” Merlin’s henchman who appears in about three scenes, and said, “Hey, that’s Pat Roach! He fought Indiana Jones in two movies of the series, and he was the evil general in Willow!” What a sad, sorry world I live in…)

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 0
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 4
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0