To be honest, I feel a little chimp-baited. There’s a monkey right there on the poster. Yet instead of heralding the glorious start to Disney’s 1960s simian selection, we get a Cold War caper structured around random occurrences, with only a fleeting ape appearance.
Based on Robert Buckner’s 1960 novel Starfire, this is core Kennedy-era space race shenanigans. Tom Tryon trades his Texas John Slaughter six-shooter for a space suit when he accidentally agrees to a manned mission around the moon, but much of the film plays out as a (sort of) comedy of errors.
Moon Pilot marks one of Disney’s early forays into lighthearted sci-fi, a genre they’d first dabbled in with the wonderful The Absent-Minded Professor and would revisit more successfully with the Medfield College films (The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, Now You See Him, Now You Don’t). But while those films had a clear youth appeal, this one wobbles between kid-friendly antics and a looser, more adult-leaning satire.
That’s just one of the problems here. Once the setup is in place—complete with France’s Dany Saval as a presumed femme fatale spy, later revealed to be an alien love interest—the film immediately loses its premise in a series of loosely connected scenes. Audiences didn’t dig it either: despite Disney’s eye for technical detail (see TV’s Man in Space), this mistimed comedy failed to find an audience willing to laugh about the space race just yet. For context, this was released about six months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, when tensions were at an all-time high.
This was an odd misfire from the same studio that had so convincingly sold the future of space travel in the 1950s Tomorrowland television specials. Those programs, including Man in Space and Man and the Moon, had been meticulous in their science-factual approach, even employing the likes of aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun. They were part of a broader Cold War PR push, with Man in Space famous for screening at the White House for President Eisenhower. But where those were aspirational, and filled with Ward Kimball’s imaginative animation, Moon Pilot muddles its tone—less a celebration of space exploration, more a scattershot Cold War farce.
Still, there are solid performances at the heart of this. A moustachioed Brian Keith anticipates George C. Scott’s Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove (1964), chewing scenery with gusto as he bellows his way through dialogue. Edmond O’Brien’s bumbling McClosky—redubbed a Federal Security Officer after FBI objections—might have hit differently if the Feds had a sense of humour about it. (They didn’t).
It’s also hard to pinpoint who this was made for. The chimp seems to be there for the kids, but the soft spy plot, love story, and digs at Beatnik culture scattershot across early ’60s touchstones. (Keep an eye out for a young Sally Field in her film debut during the Beatnik lineup). The whole thing culminates—sans additional chimp cameos, I should add—with a Sherman Brothers-penned duet about The Seven Moons of Beta Lyrae being made for loving.
The only reason I can’t quite call this the strangest thing to come out of Disney in 1962 is that the behind-the-scenes special, made for Disney’s television anthology series The Wonderful World of Color, is even weirder. A clearly not-on-set Walt Disney introduces the episode and takes us “behind the scenes” to Stage 2, where Tryon naps on a sofa while Keith, Edmond O’Brien, and one of the “astro-chimps” play poker. This sequence lingers a little too long, ironically giving us more monkey-related content than the feature film itself. (A promo spot doubles down on this, highlighting the “space-happy astro-chimp” as a major selling point—effectively chimp-baiting an entire nation).
The antics continue as Tryon and “the young French girl we brought over from Paris,” Dany Saval, bicker in character. Saval leans heavily into the flighty, ditzy archetype before delivering a lesser version of the aforementioned song.
Unlike Disney’s zanier sci-fi comedies, Moon Pilot drifted into deep space, rarely resurfacing outside Disney completist circles. It didn’t get a high-profile re-release, and its absence from Disney+ suggests even the company has left it floating in the void. While this rocket may not have launched to the Moon, it might just function well enough as a time capsule of whatever Disney had lying around the office the day it was sealed.
MORE FROM DISNEY MINUS: Newman Laugh-O-Grams | Walt’s first fairy tales | Alice Comedies | Oswald the (Un)lucky Rabbit | Silly Symphonies | The Spirit of 1943 | So Dear to My Heart | One Hour in Wonderland | The early lost films | Johnny Tremain | Westerns of the 1950s | Moon Pilot
