reactormag.com
The Flight of Dragons: Magic, Science, and a Lot of Hot Air
Column
80s Fantasy Film Club
The Flight of Dragons: Magic, Science, and a Lot of Hot Air
Is this an overlooked Rankin/Bass classic, or has it been forgotten for a reason?
By Tyler Dean
|
Published on February 24, 2026
Credit: Warner Bros.
Comment
0
Share New
Share
Credit: Warner Bros.
In this ongoing column, we’re looking back at the 1980s as their own particular age of fantasy movies—a legacy that largely disappeared in the ’90s only to resurface in the 2000s, though in many ways, the fantasy films of the Eighties are far weirder and less polished than what we got in the aughts. In each of these articles, we’ll explore a canonical fantasy movie released between 1980 and 1989 and discuss whatever enduring legacy the film has maintained in the decades since.
For a more in-depth introduction to this series of articles, you can find the first installment here, focusing on 1981’s Dragonslayer. Last time we delved into one of the decade’s most delightful fusions of fantasy and sci fi with Krull (1983); this time around, we’re revisiting a kid-friendly mashup of a dozen or so fantasy quest tropes with Rankin/Bass’ 1982 film The Flight of Dragons.
The Flight of Dragons was a staple of my childhood. I grew up on Rankin/Bass productions (both Christmas and non-Christmas varietals) and, while I can certainly recognize, as an adult, that The Last Unicorn is the far better film, my childhood opinion was that Flight of Dragons was the deep-cut, B-side that was the potentially better movie. I spent many long nights arguing the case for this film as if it was some underappreciated indie darling, trying to convince my friends that it offered the superior meta-commentary on fantasy stories. Was I right? Well…let’s dive in!
In my previous column, I incorrectly stated that the source material for the film was the plotless, 1979 speculative draconic biology treatise of the same name. While it does absolutely draw from that book, going so far as to name its protagonist after its author, Peter Dickinson, the film is also a loose adaptation of the 1976 novel The Dragon and the George by Gordon R. Dickson (though only the Dickinson book receives a mention in the opening credits). Like Dickson’s book, it centers on a contemporary American—a professor of medieval history by the name of Jim Eckert in the novel, a former scientist and aspiring fantasy board-game designer named Peter Dickinson in the film. Our protagonist (played with cheerful, aw-shucks astonishment by John Ritter) is magically transported to a fantasy world by the Green Wizard Carolinus (M*A*S*H’s Harry Morgan), who believes that Dickinson’s status as a “man of science” can help him defeat the evil Red Wizard, Ommadon (a role played to the sinister hilt by James Earl Jones).
Early on, Dickinson is accidentally merged with Carolinus’ dragon, Gorbash, and must learn to act as an effective dragon (thus necessitating some exposition from the real-life Peter Dickinson’s dragon biology lesson). Carolinus sends him on a quest to defeat Ommadon and steal his crown—the source of his power. Peter is joined by Carolinus’ cantankerous elder dragon, Smrgol; Sir Orrin Neville-Smythe, an aging knight; Aragh, a wry talking wolf; Danielle, an archer who serves as love interest for Sir Orrin; and Giles, an elf with no discernible personality.
The questing party fight their way through a number of fantasy monsters—with Smrgol nobly sacrifices himself to defeat an Ogre—and deploy a couple of magical maguffins gifted by Carolinus’ Wizard allies. Peter learns to master his draconic form, only to be turned back into a pitiful human in time for the final confrontation, in which he (and this is not a joke) defeats the Red Wizard by listing off a cavalcade of scientific facts which devolves into just listing random fields of study. Carolinus returns Peter back to his own time and, through a last burst of magical luck, Princess Melisande, who has become enamored of Peter through his journey, decides that she’s willing to settle down in early ’80s Boston in order to be with him, and pawns Ommadan’s crown so that Peter can finance his board game.
So does Flight of Dragons hold up? The answer is, a real mixed bag and even though I desperately wanted to be transported again, it was a bit of a rough watch. A huge part of the letdown here lies in Romeo Muller’s script. Muller was a longtime collaborator of Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass, having written their adaptations of Tolkien’s works (including The Return of the King) and many of their Christmas specials. In those cases, there was an underlying story to follow and established, enduring characters to build on. But with only Dickinson’s expository source material mashed up with some basic plot ideas borrowed from Dickson’s novel to guide the narrative, the movie becomes mired in the stentorian, overblown, faux-Shakespearean dialog that occasionally limited Muller’s other collaborations. Take, for example, the moment when the Green Wizard Carolinus delivers the command “Summon the silver owls of the full moon! Summon them I say!” in an oddly casual way that feels a little baffling. Later, Carolinus’ ward, Princess Melisande, offers Peter the convoluted greeting, “You must be he who my guardian has sought to save our world.” Those sorts of unnecessarily wordy proclamations bog down the whole affair. These problems are mirrored in the movie’s fantasy setting, a world full of magic rules and ancient creatures that feels both overly busy and underbaked, filled with odd inconsistencies in tone, like the fact that Carolinus and his fellow wizards are on multiple occasions referred to as “the four magic brothers,” a phrase which just doesn’t jibe with all the overblown dialog flying around.
The script is chock-full of exposition, establishing the many rules that dictate the plot but don’t necessarily follow from a cohesive worldview. It’s not that a children’s film can’t indulge in some arbitrary magical minutiae, but too much time is spent selling us on the fact that, say a quest needs three people to be magically sanctioned, or that the personification of Antiquity (in the form of a magic tree) forbids direct intervention in magical wars, and must be the one to name the champion who will lead their quest is mentioned; these unwieldy details are brought up so often that one starts to hope they’ll just skip ahead to the action. Instead, this culminates in a full ten minutes of the film detailing the minutiae of how dragons fly (thus honoring their source material, if not the audience’s wishes).
Thematically, the film feels quite confused. The central conflict is between science and magic, which are seen as inherently inimical to one another and must be kept in balance. Peter is said to be a man of science and therefore able to triumph over magic, but he is written as so adrift in his love for fantasy that even before he’s ever transported into the realm of fantasy, he goes around admitting that he’s convinced dragons must have really existed at some point in time. In this world he happens to be right, but it’s a dubious claim for a quintessential man of science to make. In fact, while he is described as having received numerous grants and fellowships, the only “science” he ever really offers the narrative is to tell Carolinus that milk cures stomach ulcers. This leads to Carolinus casting a spell to transmute cider into milk with the magic words: “Cala Bovinamo!”
There are some genuine highlights in the midst of this muck. James Earl Jones lends his delightful, gravelly basso to the evil Ommadon and sells his goofy lines with a gravitas that most of the other actors can’t quite achieve. James Gregory (who is probably best known for playing the villainous Senator Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate) brings a folksy charisma to the aging dragon Smrgol that both lightens the mood and lends real pathos to his death.
There are also some neat ideas and interesting visual designs throughout. At one point, the questing party encounters “sandmirks”—chittering, rodent-like creatures whose relentless noise drives anyone who hears them insane. They are quite nasty looking and the vague Lovecraftian horror of their intervention recalls the scariest bits of Rankin/Bass’ animation (think the Watchers of Cirith Ungol in Return of the King and Mommy Fortuna’s harpy from The Last Unicorn). Likewise, the image of Ommadon sprouting multiple dragon heads from his back and the absolutely monstrous, human-faced Worm of Sligoff feel like delightfully weird breaks from the boilerplate fantasy designs that populate the rest of the film.
A lot of the film’s humor is anemic at best, as in the moment Peter looks at the magical projection of Carolinus’ realm of enchantment and exclaims, “Wow, what a movie show!” But occasionally, the jokes manage to land through some charming mugging at the camera from various characters. The design of Carolinus feels like a strangely lazy green palette swap of the Winter Warlock from Rankin/Bass’ Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town (1970), but his faces manage to lend some levity to Muller’s jokes.
But we really need to get to the film’s biggest visual drawback: the dragons themselves. It’s not that the dragons look bad. The designs are taken from Wayne Anderson’s illustrations in the original book. But having to animate the dragons while incorporating Dickinson’s biological precepts means that they move across the frame as big, ungainly blimps—tottering along, robbed of majesty or fearsome mien. Perhaps Dickinson’s ideas, clever as they may be, simply weren’t meant to be animated. For a film that’s all about how cool dragons are, it manages to depict them as unremittingly goofy, even when they are meant to come across as scary or powerful.
So what, if any impact, has The Flight of Dragons had on pop culture? I can personally attest to the fact that Sir Orrin Neville-Smythe, the chivalrous old questing knight who declares himself a rival to Peter for Melisande’s hand and ends up dying nobly to defend Danielle’s honor, was an early childhood crush for a certain sort of fantasy loving child (not me, in this particular case).
There is no official information on the link between the two films, but it feels like there is some shared DNA between Flight of Dragons and Dragonheart, one of the lonely entries in the all but non-existent ’90s fantasy canon. Both center on an uneasy collaboration between a dragon-fighting questing knight and a talking dragon as they seek to overturn a tyrant while finding allies among some Merry Men clones. Admittedly, the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid angle—where both knight and dragon are con men, which is part of the stated inspiration for Dragonheart’s script—sets the later film apart.
I know, anecdotally, at least a few people who discovered Dickinson’s book through this adaptation, though I suspect that they might have well done so without ever seeing it. Being a fantasy-starved kid who came of age in the ’90s meant seeking out a lot of earlier fantasy. It’s not as though it was impossible to find the Earthsea books or Dragonriders of Pern without seeing those stories brought to the screen.
Again, while this might be a bit of a stretch, one can conceivably see this movie as another stepping stone in the success of Rankin/Bass’ partner studio, Topcraft. As the same Japanese animation studio that would go on to make Nausicaä and the Valley of the Wind two years later—effectively launching Hayao Miyazaki’s career and Studio Ghibli alongside it—there is some small bit of a larger legacy that Flight of Dragons shares with (arguably) the most important animator of the last fifty years. Even so, Topcraft worked with Rankin/Bass on a number of projects, and this one is hardly a highlight of their collaboration.
So, this may be the rare film covered in this column whose afterlife is somewhat limited to our memories of the film itself. Certainly, while it was my favorite growing up, I can also recognize that the nostalgia I had for it stems from a very specific desire to see active worldbuilding in my fantasy stories. I loved stories with intricate rules that offered glimpses into a larger world that kept the narrative from being completely self-contained. It’s for that reason that a part of me still geeks out over Peter Jackson’s much-maligned Hobbit trilogy and the way Jackson weaves back in Tolkien’s appendices—as a young reader, those appendices, which contextualize the original children’s story, gave me a jumping-off point to wonder about the untold stories of the broader Middle-earth. In a similar way, The Flight of Dragons suggests a world that’s much larger than what we actually see and that resonated so strongly for me when I was a child, even if the movie turns out to be a bit dull upon a rewatch and something of a dead end in terms of its larger legacy.
But don’t let that keep you from seeking it out! I still get chills from Don McLean’s eponymous theme song, even if adult-me can recognize that it is a far cry from America’s songs from The Last Unicorn (released the same year). And of course, I’d love to hear your thoughts: Are there things to love about The Flight of Dragons as an adult viewer? Is it an unsung gem in the Rankin/Bass catalog, or is it just as frustratingly messy as I’ve intimated here? Be sure to let me know in the comments, and join me next time when we finally acknowledge the crown jewel of the Rankin/Bass fantasy canon with The Flight of Dragon’s superior sister film, The Last Unicorn.[end-mark]
The post <i>The Flight of Dragons</i>: Magic, Science, and a Lot of Hot Air appeared first on Reactor.
New Posts (Home)
ChatBox
Popular Posts 
Game Zone
Top PodCasts
