Moon Pilot

A popular trope in science fiction is the concept of elements that are not found on Earth. This is, and I say this as an English major, a total misunderstanding of how elements work. Elements are all made of the same stuff—protons, neutrons, and electrons. The number of them determines the element. That’s how they work. The only way to have new elements is to have ones with a higher number than the ones we currently know about, which because of [physics I only vaguely understand] does not work. They’d all be incredibly radioactive and decay almost immediately. Things can be unfamiliar alloys, or molecules never seen before, or what have you, but elements? Yeah, you’re not going to get new ones without rewriting the laws of physics in ways that would be worth mentioning.

Anyway, Captain Richmond Talbot (Tom Tryon) is part of the crew that retrieves astrochimp Charlie from the first flight around the Moon. For reasons, he is volunteered to be the first human pilot on the trip, and for further reasons it has to happen right away. He wrangles permission to go visit his mother (Sarah Selby) before the trip, and on the plane, he encounters a beautiful woman (Dany Saval) who appears to know all about him. He lets General John M. Vanneman (Brian Keith) know about her, and he ends up dealing with security agent McClosky (Edmond O’Brien).

The chimp is barely in the movie, and he’s there for longer than seventh-billed Tommy Kirk, who plays Talbot’s younger brother Walter. Now, maybe Walter’s got more of a role in the book—but it’s a 120-page novella called Starfire that I’d never heard of before. Mostly he’s there to get Talbot from the airport to his mother’s house, which doesn’t feel important. Still, it gave Tommy Kirk something to do, and it’s funny to have a character in a Disney movie be named Walter, I guess. The movie also features blink-and-you’ll-miss-them feature debuts of Sally Field and Jo Anne Worley.

There are many things that confused me about the movie, and I’d have a hard time saying which one confused me most, but high on the list was the fact that the space mission was canonically run out of McChord Air Force Base. Now, I am an expert on neither space flight nor the Air Force—though I do know more than a man who would join it despite a fear of flying—but I do know that you want to launch your rockets as close to the equator as possible, which is why American missions are launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Whereas McChord Air Force Base is close enough to be here in Western Washington that the artillery practice at Fort Lewis, now joined to it as a single base, shakes my house.

There’s a claim I found while digging around for access to this movie (it’s on the Internet Archive, blessedly) that this is the worst Disney movie ever made. It is not. It does feature a bottom-tier Sherman Brothers song, though whether that’s good or bad I leave it to you to decide, and while I’m fond of both Edmond O’Brien and Brian Keith they’re definitely wasted here. This movie’s biggest failing is that it’s bland. The Love Bug would do more with a San Francisco setting, and The Cat From Outer Space would do more with aliens. This is the kind of forgettable Disney movie people think about when they think of the live action stuff.