“There’s a keyhole, so there’s got to be a key. And we know who’s got it, don’t we?”

Justin’s rating: This movie’s title sounds like a Ben and Jerry’s ice cream flavor… that probably tastes terrible.

Justin’s review: The other day I’m rummaging around doing some behind-the-scenes stuff for this site when a random comment about something or the other unlocked a memory cascade. I suddenly was thinking of some sort of movie I used to watch a lot as a kid about a spinning time machine and an airplane. It was such a sudden and strong memory that I wasn’t entirely sure it was real rather than a dream. But lo and behold, what I was recalling was The Blue Yonder, a Disney TV movie from the same year that Back to the Future released.

This made sense why it was such a key childhood touchstone for me, because (a) I was a nut for science fiction even back then and (b) our family was always and forever recording Disney TV movies like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes and The Rescue. All that was left was for me to tarnish that childhood memory by dragging my pasty middle-aged critic mind over for a rewatch.

Jonathan (Huckleberry Fox) is an 11-year-old dreamer who just so happens to have a crazy old inventor friend named Doc Brown. Wait, no, it’s Henry, a good friend of Jonathan’s long-dead grandfather Max. It turns out that Max was both a visionary inventor of time machines (in the 1920s, no less) and an airplane pilot with aspirations of being the first person to cross the Atlantic.

Furthermore, Henry is devoted to keep Max’s memories alive with an entire basement shrine to the guy — and to take Max’s blueprints and create the time machine himself. When Henry gets laid up, Jonathan decides to take advantage of a limited “time window” to hop back from the ’80s to 1927. The mission? Meet his grandfather and convince him never to take the fatal flight.

The Blue Yonder always low-key unnerved me as a kid because of the time machine itself. It doesn’t look that safe, just a frame with a lot of electronics and gears attached, and the way that it swallows Jonathan up suggests a device that is more in control of him than the other way around.

But the unnerving part was the warning that Jonathan had to get back to the time machine at a very specific time or else be stranded in the past. There’s a countdown clock and everything. It lent this film a real sense of pressure and tension, especially when it’s a kid’s life on the line.

Of course, the machine is not really scary but a vehicle that allows Jonathan to visit a grandfather he never knew. Max (Peter Coyote, the good government agent from E.T.) has a lot in common with his grandson and takes him under his wing for three days.

It’s no Back to the Future, but The Blue Yonder does provide some of those same fish-out-of-water vibes as Jonathan explores the past of 1927. He doesn’t seem that freaked out that he’s away from his family or anything, treating this like a fun adventure.

I guess that’s how kid movies used to be, lots of naive gawping and can-do spirit and “yes, let’s go for a ride in the alien spaceship and see how things work out.” Today? Today we can’t duct tape enough nerf on children for our liking.

So Jonathan gets to know Max and tries to warn him off of the trip while a shady cop and a bootlegger stumble upon the time machine and try to track the kid down for his key. Max is bound and determined to go on his fatal flight, though, even with a pregnant wife at home. That’s actually a bit dark, even with history slightly altered in the end (he still dies, but he gets a plaque).

It is uncanny how many beats from Back to the Future this hits, although it’s unclear if these filmmakers even knew of that film. Yet it’s more of a character piece with an unexpectedly tragic conclusion, and thus is its own creature. Director Mark Rosman had a weirdly mixed filmography after this, revisiting scifi with Evolver and hitting rock bottom with The Perfect Man.

From what I can tell, The Blue Yonder pretty much disappeared over time itself. It never got much of a wide release or any major reviews outside of its initial appearance on Disney’s movie of the week. It’s a cute, wholesome little product, perhaps skewed a bit too much for kids, but Peter Coyote still gives it his all in a charming performance that’s fun to watch, and there’s some nice time travel touches that show some thought was put into it. I think it deserves to be known rather than completely erased (erased… from existence!).

Intermission!

• “A Three Blind Mice” production — you could totally come up with a better title for your production company, c’mon
• Back when kids used to bike home directly in heavy traffic with no helmets
• I remember the airplane model that he paints! I remember that! Nobody cares!
• That whole basement is a not-creepy-at-all shrine to a guy who’s been dead like six decades
• Guy has a heart episode? Just shake him awake!
• Warm buttermilk is the bee’s knees
• Kid doesn’t pack anything to go into the past?
• 67 hours until the return trip
• 17 cents for three giant candy bars and a newspaper
• I really do like how Jonathan raises suspicion because he uses a more modern dollar bill that looks way different than a ’20s bill would
• That plane crash should’ve killed the pilot, but nope, he’s hanging out in a tree branch
• “This is extremely weird!”
• I like how Jonathan quietly looks around his house as it existed in the 20s
• Max is more than OK taking in a strange kid for a few days
• “I’m going to say it’s a boy” “It is”
• He drew up plans for a time machine with some parts that “haven’t been invented yet?”
• The plane crash scene is pretty traumatic
• So weird he meets his grandson but never his son
• A reporter for 20 minutes