Just when you thought Hollywood had completed their systematic strip-mining of Gen X and millennial nostalgia totems, there’s a miniature cave-in and the mineshaft is revealed as even deeper.

Those viewers of a certain age (in this instance, your late thirties and early forties) will recall Randal Kleiser’s 1986 sci-fi/fantasy film Flight of the Navigator, the thrilling tale of a young boy who bonks himself on the head so hard he passes out for eight years and awakens to find that he hasn’t aged a day. The colorful yarn incorporated aliens and flying hovercrafts and all manner of childhood whimsy, surviving today as one of Disney’s lesser-known properties but beloved by a small, devoted faction.

You may or may not be pleased to learn that Flight of the Navigator will, after many stalled attempts (one by noted The Book of Henry director Colin Trevorrow), get a modern-day remake on the sooner side. Variety reports that Lionsgate and the Henson Company have tapped Lucifer showrunner Joe Henderson to draw up a script, with no other major creative personnel yet attached. As ever, whether this does right by the original or crashes in a flaming heap has a lot to do with the talent that has not yet been established.

But the possibilities for this property are pretty rich — updating it for the present wouldn’t be all that difficult, and the entertainment potential of an alien invasion is, in its own way, eternal. We maintain a healthy skepticism towards remake clearly playing on our generational weakness for remember-when-ism, but this could turn out okay.

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