'Final Fantasy,' the first film with an entire cast of hyper-realistic, computer-generated human characters, is likely to reanimate a 20-year debate over the role of 'synthespians.'
Jim Walczak, of Williamstown, has been making Christmas cards and sending them to family and friends for 50 years. He uses traditional artistic methods, creating them using vintage type-set and
Joey Cramer, aged 12, in Flight of the Navigator
Credit: Alamy
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.