Unidentified Flying Oddball

A NASA spacecraft travelling faster than light ends up not in deep space but in the England of King Arthur, in the 1979 Disney comedy Unidentified Flying Oddball. Aboard are Tom Trimble, a good-natured inventor, and Hermes, an android he has built to look exactly like himself. The two are taken prisoner at Camelot, where their modern technology first raises suspicion and then becomes useful, since the court faces a plot involving the scheming Sir Mordred and the magician Merlin. Tom also strikes up a friendship with Alisande, and it falls to him to use twentieth-century know-how against the conspirators.

Russ Mayberry directed, working from a screenplay by Don Tait, with Ron Miller producing for Walt Disney Productions on a budget of about five million dollars. The film arrived in July 1979 and sits between Mayberry's The Rebels and A Place to Call Home. Dennis Dugan plays Tom Trimble, while the Camelot side of the cast includes Jim Dale as Sir Mordred, Kenneth More as King Arthur, Ron Moody as Merlin, John Le Mesurier as Sir Gawain and Rodney Bewes as Clarence.

The comic clash between space-age gadgetry and Arthurian legend runs just over an hour and a half. Audience scores are modest and broadly consistent: 5.2 out of 10 on IMDb from around 1,500 votes, and 5.6 out of 10 on TMDB from a much smaller number of 43 votes.