Children's Movies to Rent for Sci Fi Fans

Kid Movies Take Viewers on Time Travel and Alien Adventures

May 4, 2009

In the mood to for children's classic movies that will excite the imagination and take you to worlds you can only dream of? Check out these sci fi kid movies to rent.

These days, it’s not uncommon for movie studios to pour over a hundred million dollars into the movie budget of a children’s film to make movies like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone or DreamWork’s Monsters vs. Aliens.

But as fun as these films are to watch, there was a time when a kid movie could take audiences on journeys beyond their wildest dreams for only a fraction of current movie budgets.

Here now, are two children’s classic movies to rent that remind us that creativity and imagination can still be more powerful than a giant movie budget.

Made with only a $10.5 million movie budget, Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extraterrestrial went on to become an international hit that still charms generations almost thirty years after its original release.

When a friendly extraterrestrial is accidentally stranded on Earth, he befriends Elliot (Henry Thomas), a lonely boy, who hides “E.T.” in his closet. As Elliot, his brother Michael (Robert MacNaughton), and sister Gertie (a young Drew Barrymore) help E.T. contact his people, E.T. experiences human culture through the eyes of a suburban child – leading to humorous scenes where he dresses as a ghost for Halloween, listens to a bedtime story, and rides on a bicycle with Elliot.

Although based in sci fi, E.T. succeeds mainly as a story about friendship between a boy and an alien who, according to Spielberg in the book Steven Spielberg: A Biography by Joseph McBride, was based on an imaginary alien friend he created for himself after his parents’ divorce in 1960. The poignant blend of fantasy and reality allowed the film to have an honored place among the best science fiction movies.

While some fans wanted this movie to continue, Spielberg decided against this – although a book sequel, E.T. The Book of the Green Planet, was written by William Kotzwinkle who also wrote the film’s novelization. Fans also got to see E.T.’s home world in the Universal Studios ride, E.T. Adventure, which includes characters from the book sequel.

When twelve-year-old David (Joey Cramer) falls into a ravine in 1978, he wakes up to find he is in 1986, although he has not aged a day. Distressed to learn his parents and brother are now eight years older and he is now a curiosity for scientists to analyze, David soon learns he was abducted by the alien spacecraft “Max” (voiced by Paul Reubens) eight years ago. Because Max can travel at speeds faster than light, time moved much slower for David during his trip, preventing him from aging.

With the help of an intern (played by a young Sarah Jessica Parker), David escapes the scientists and finds Max, who explains he needs the navigation charts he downloaded into David’s brain to return to his planet. After Max agrees to take David back home first, the two become friends, but wind up getting lost in Tokyo and San Francisco due to David’s lousy sense of direction and their attempts to evade the scientists.

Curiously, while Max is an alien ship, the real "alien" in this Disney children movie is David, who feels he’s on a different planet in the 1980s with its punk rock bands and multiple brands of Coca Cola. For all these bizarre scenes, however, the film succeeds primarily as a buddy movie, as David and Max become two friends on a strange road trip – even squabbling over what routes they should take to get home. One of the best cult classic movies among Disney movie fans, Flight of the Navigator is a great movie to rent for fans of 1980s sci fi videos.

The copyright of the article Children's Movies to Rent for Sci Fi Fans in Sci-Fi/Fantasy Films is owned by Michael Jung. Permission to republish Children's Movies to Rent for Sci Fi Fans in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.