The year is 1986 and pre-teen David Freeman is lost in time. Captured by a bunch of government assholes and imprisoned for study, his only friend is a young lab assistant named Carolyn, who would later change her name to Carrie and go on to live a fabulous life in New York City writing about the adventures of her promiscuous friends. But just then, she was David Freeman’s only ally, she had her own robot, she loved weird kids and awesome music videos, she wore a geeky lab coat, and she had rockin purple hair. To 9-year-old Josh Tyler, with big dreams of replacing David as The Navigator, that made her the coolest girl in the world.
To Sarah Jessica Parker Flight of the Navigator is probably just a blip on her filmography, but if you were one of the thousands of boys who flocked to theaters in the summer of 86’ and dreamed of hopping on a robot powered ship and rocketing off into the galaxy, for a brief moment in time she was the first woman you wanted to spend time with… who wasn’t your mother. For me she was one of my very first movie crushes, at an age when I probably didn’t even understand what a crush was. All I knew was that Carolyn McAdams was, unlike all the icky girls I knew at school, super cool.
From that moment on I became a Sarah Jessica Parker fan, and those strange, warm feelings for her persisted into adulthood, even after liking her wasn’t cool, even after she became the butterface posterchild, even after she became a symbol for estrogen powered entertainment, the kind that sends men running for the hills. No matter what she does or where she goes, I’ll always carry a torch inside for Sarah Jessica Parker, kept right next to that little place which still longs for that inevitable moment when a Paul Reubens voiced robot starship to tell me “You are the Navigator!”
Hey guys, I know you’re out there. Forget gold bikini Princess Leia. You’re still waiting for SJR to brush your hair and tell you, “you know, you’re cute.” Before you’re forced to sit through Sex and the City: The Movie this weekend by your girlfriend, hop in my time machine and remember better days with SJP. Watch the moments that forever sealed her as my dream girl in the two Flight of the Navigator videos below:
