There’s bad timing, and then there’s SpaceCamp.
Director Harry Winer watched the final cut of his film the morning of January 28th, 1986, about an hour after Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic. The movie had been shot, wrapped, and was ready for an early spring release. But seven astronauts died on live television while millions of schoolkids watched from their classroom chairs, myself included, so SpaceCamp was put in a drawer for five months while the country caught its breath.
When it finally opened on June 6th, Ebert gave it one and a half stars and wrote that our memories were too painful. And so it made less than $10 million at the box office, despite actual NASA cooperation, a roaring John Williams score, Kate Capshaw and Lea Thompson riding the Back to the Future wave.
If you strip away the shuttle context, SpaceCamp is a “Spielbergian” greatest hits reel. It should have been hit, it should have been The Goonies in space.
It was cleary made to be just that. The script reads like the writers absorbed everything that was working that decade, not in some imitative way, they just seemed perfectly atuned to the whole mid-80s frequency. weaving in some high school comedy, a competition movie, a teen dramedy, an E.T. moment or two, a smidge of Goonies, a dash of Short Circuit, and some Top Gun. You also get plenty of Star Wars references outside of Max (Joaquin Phoenix, still credited as Leaf) quoting it constantly.
It moves like a hot knife through plot points, and the moment they blast off you stop thinking about the Star Wars references, because it becomes all about the kids working actual problems with actual procedure. Without space magic, or lucky breaks. Lea Thompson has said that people come up to her now saying SpaceCamp made them want to become physicists and inventors. It worked for me too.
The summer of 1986 was the last one I spent as a kid, though I didn’t know it at the time. I was twelve when SpaceCamp was released, and that movie became inextricably linked to every memory I have of that season. For me, it’s also the summer that splits the 80s in two, and I could feel it even then. Breakdancing got unfashionable, Michael Jackson mania was winding down, New Wave was handing off its MTV dominance to hair metal while rap was gaining real momentum, and adult contemporary pop was starting to sound more and more like Motown. Cosby sweaters were in. The BMX gave way to the skateboard.
And almost every movie I saw that summer was echoing these changes. Labyrinth, Stand By Me, Transformers: The Movie, even Howard the Duck (Lea again), each one seemed to be warning me about what was coming. SpaceCamp too.
A year earlier I might have been rooting for Max, the kid-appeal stand-in with the Star Wars quotes and the robot friend. But by the time I saw SpaceCamp in theaters, he seemed a little young for the lunch table I was hoping to sit at come September. I was in Kathryn’s camp instead. She had that manic pixie thing going, great style, seemingly very together, but underneath she was supersmart, could remember everything, which was a trait I recognised though mine was considerably less voluntary, and she genuinely wanted to go to space. And she looked like Kelly Preston, which at 12 is basically my whole argument and my realisation that crushing started getting more intense.
The film ends abruptly, no Breakfast Club fist-pump, no tidy emotional goodbye, just a splashdown and credits. The kids who went up in that shuttle weren’t the same kids who landed, and at twelve I thought the movie owed me more closure than that.
Still, that summer ended the same way, and suffered from its own bad timing. The junior high school zones were completely different from elementary, which meant my friends got scattered across three different schools. I said goodbye to a lot of people that summer without knowing it was goodbye.
That 12-year-old who built skate ramps and treehouses, bought Marvel 25th anniversary issues with the special covers, loitered at the video store for hours even when he had no money to rent anything, at the crossroads of every possibility, who could still be anything and anyone. He walked into that school in September, and disappeared.
But I still remember him sitting in that theater in June and loving SpaceCamp.
-Pop