Last night—yes, I’m writing this the day it’s due, as subscribers to the Patreon levels that get early access already knew—I was telling my partner that I had to write articles today and told him which movie I was writing about, including giving a loose plot summary because this movie has three titles, which we’ll get to later. He declared it what he calls “a good Saturday afternoon movie,” meaning the kind that isn’t great but is passable if you’re just looking to kill time for ninety minutes. I was already impressed that he remembered it, but then he actually correctly described the ending. Though it is, I suppose, fairly memorable if you can remember the movie at all.
Tom Trimble (Dennis Dugan, a ‘70s Generic White Boy Actor and now director of Adam Sandler movies) is a scientist who gets taken off working on Transcendental Meditation or some damn thing and put onto creating an android who is fully indistinguishable from a human. Because why the hell not. This is because there is a space program of some sort that involves relativistic flight and therefore time travel and they don’t want to risk a human. So he makes a duplicate of himself, and why not, and for reasons they both end up going into the capsule which for reasons ends up sending him to Camelot.
First, he meets Alisande (Sheila White), whom he promptly dubs Sandy, a peasant girl who believes, for reasons, that her father has been turned into a goose. He then gets embroiled in a complicated series of events involving the court of King Arthur (Kenneth More), earning the enmity of Merlin (Ron Moody) and Mordred (Jim Dale), who in this movie are working together. He is able to use his twentieth century technology—including the android, dubbed Hermes—to save the day.
This is, of course, a retelling of the classic Twain story A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Its third title is, indeed, A Spaceman in King Arthur’s Court; betweentimes it was The Spaceman and King Arthur. I suspect the first title was chosen for its wackiness, the second because the first doesn’t accurately describe anything that happens, and the third because they wanted people to understand the story going in. Honestly none of them are particularly good in my opinion, but what do you do? Tom isn’t even supposed to be an astronaut, because the whole point of Hermes is that it’s deemed unsafe to risk a human on the mission.
I could do without the dopiness of Sir Gawain (John Le Mesurier). How exactly Gawain is portrayed varies a lot in the original tales, mostly as Lancelot and Galahad gain importance, but this ain’t it. He’s comic relief here, but the important thing about comic relief is that it should be, you know, comic. Not tedious. Gawain is the only knight other than Mordred to be at Camelot for the events of this plot, though we do get to see the Round Table, and it’s hard to understand how an Arthur such as we see here could’ve done everything he’s supposed to have done, especially if the other knights are anything like Gawain.
Honestly, a lot of the plot revolves around “and why not.” The whole thing with Sandy’s father, for example. He turns out to be imprisoned by Mordred, not turned into a goose by Merlin, and Tom discovers this only for Mordred to successfully hide all the people he’s thrown in the dungeon without Arthur’s knowledge. At Camelot. Arthur’s castle. It doesn’t make sense, but we go along with it because why not.
Similarly, when they’re programming the android, they decide it needs to be as human as possible. Star Trek fans are sitting up straight at this one, and while it’s true that we are never told if Hermes is Fully Functional, he is given a sex drive. Which is trained by using one of Disney’s vanishingly rare references to pornography. There’s a Totally Not Playboy that’s a recurring gag, which Hermes himself brought onto the spacecraft. I do not understand this at all, but it’s part of the movie and why not.
Obviously the science is dreadful. You don’t need me to tell you that. I’m happy that Tom is able to figure out how to launch his capsule using only materials available in the sixth century, but I don’t think he should be able to do that. I can’t imagine it would survive getting into orbit without the protection of a multi-stage rocket, but we’ll pretend, or maybe it doesn’t need to in order to go through time which is its own problem but shhhhh. We are very definitely repeating to ourselves that it’s just a show and we should really just relax, here.
Likewise with the history. One of the problems with Arthurian legend generally is that our mental aesthetic for it and the actual time in which it’s obviously set don’t line up. So okay, Tom is able to pull the sword from the stone (it’s not Excalibur, which is a later sword) because his heart is pure; presumably he could lift Mjolnir, too. That’s the fiction we’re going with. Sandy’s wearing what is generally known in Ren faire circles as an Irish overdress when she should be wearing a simple kirtle. The armour is likewise several centuries out of place. And of course, as English Heritage reminds us, there basically weren’t castles at all between the Romans and the Normans. 1
I could do without the running bit where Tom is incapable of giving a short answer about anything and loads everything he says with tons of anachronisms. The court at Camelot doesn’t need to know about Thomas Edison to know that this Tom has traveled through time from the future, and Sandy’s not going to understand what he means when he tells her who he took to prom. So okay, he’s not a historian, or a folklorist which is what you actually need for Camelot, but “my people built a time machine that sent me here” is a complete sentence. I’m even willing to pretend that post-Roman Britons would understand it with no language barrier.
- 1I would be remiss if I didn’t share this delightful line from their website. “With thick stone walls often reinforced by projecting towers, they were intended to beat off the Saxon sea-raiders who eventually overwhelmed Roman Britain.” ↩︎