The Reluctant Astronaut (1967)

Directed by

Edward Montagne

Genre

science fiction film

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 41m

Rated

NR

Rating

6.0 of 10 from 45 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A carnival ride operator gets a job as a janitor at a space center and ends up going to space. Don Knotts plays the bumbling hero who stumbles through a series of mishaps.

zanylight-heartedwhimsicalslapstickeasygoingcornyfun

What happens

The Reluctant Astronaut is a 1967 American comedy film produced and directed by Edward Montagne and starring Don Knotts in a story about a carnival ride operator who is hired as a janitor at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston and is eventually sent into space. Comedian Knotts had won several Emmy Awards as small-town comic sheriff's deputy Barney Fife in the 1960–1968 television sitcom The Andy Griffith Show but left the show as a regular at the end of its fifth season (1964–1965) to pursue a career in feature films with Universal Pictures. The Reluctant Astronaut followed Knotts' first Universal film venture, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966). Actor Paul Hartman appears in the film and would later star in The Andy Griffith Show. The film's screenplay writers Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum had served as teleplay writers for the television series. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

• Guided Mouse-ille (1967)
• Have Rocket, Will Travel (1959)
• The Flim-Flam Man (1967)
• The Ambushers (1967)
• Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon (1967)
• The Terrornauts (1967)
• Mars Needs Women (1967)
• O-Solar Meow (1967)