I was talking about the differences between the 70s and 80s with a somewhat younger friend who sees me as a real old timer on account of my Night Court and Barney Miller references.
I remember seeing a movie when I was a kid, the premise was that a boy went into a coma (or something similar, it was not clear) in the late 1970s and woke up in the mid 1980s. He was a complete fish out of water and decidedly out of step with his peers - he thought that Jimmy Carter was still president and the Bee Gees were still cool…
I always look back at that film as a reminder of how little popular culture seems to have changed in the last 6-7 years, in comparison to say 1979-1985 or 1969-1975.
Was it Flight of the Navigator? That kid didn’t go into a coma–he was walking home and got knocked out and somehow got abducted or something. But he comes back to his family and hasn’t aged, but his parents are older and his younger brother is now 16. The wiki.
Flight of the Navigator. A 12 year old boy is abducted by aliens in 1978 and returned to 1986 without having aged a day. He didn’t feel the passage of time. Fun movie. Sarah Jessica Parker and Howard Hesseman appear. Paul Ruebens is the voice of the alien ship.
I don’t really recall it dealing so much with the culture shock of missing the intervening 8 years but …
In the movie Flight of the Navigator a young boy is abducted by aliens in 1978 and returned to Earth in 1986. It seems instantaneous to him, he doesn’t realize any time has passed until confronted with evidence. He hasn’t aged, when he finally finds his family his younger brother is now older than him.
Paul Reubens did the voice of the space ship (uncredited).
Veronica Cartwright played the mom and she looked cute because she always looks cute. And she didn’t get attacked by birds or aliens so, good on her for that.
Not what the OP is looking for, but the Stephen King novel (and subsequent film) The Dead Zone featured a character falling into a five year coma during the seventies. When he awakens, people are catching him up on the history he missed and somebody tells him President Nixon was involved in a major scandal and resigned. He’s horrified when he hears this and somebody asks him what’s wrong. He says he just realized Spiro Agnew is President.
Thats it! I guess after 29 years, my memory was faulty on the details, other than the Bee Gees joke. I kept searching “coma, boy, movie, 70s” and got nowhere!
Just want to mention a low-budget Christian movie based on a similar conceit-
TRIBULATION (Apocalypse III)- Gary Busey is a police officer investigating cultic crimes. His sister Margot Kidder is a Christian who witnesses to him. The cultists attack him & put him into a coma. He awakens several years later, after the Rapture- his sister & wife are gone and the AntiChrist is in power. Those who have taken the Mark “forget” they even had Christian loved ones who went in the Rapture. Oh, and the cultists- they are the local enforcers for the AntiChrist (Franco Macalusso, played by Nick Mancuso - my favorite movie AntiChrist).
Nixon resigned? Wow.
Agnew isn’t president, Ford is?
Henry Ford is President?!?!
Regarding the OP, as I recall from the movie, the kid gets picked up by some cops who run his name and discover the missing person report from eight years earlier, though it doesn’t add up because that kid, if he was still alive, would be 16 by now. One of the cops asks the kid “Do you know who the president is?”
The kid replies along the lines of “Duh. Jimmy Carter.” The cops look at each other.
