trying to find an 80s "Connecticut Yankee"-style movie

July 9, 2020 11:30 AM

I have a childhood memory of a 70s or 80s movie about a modern man in a medieval setting. For years I thought it was Unidentified Flying Oddball, but I finally watched UFO last night, and it was not the same movie! Please help me find this movie, great and powerful MeFi!

I remember three scenes from it:

The hero (a blond, white man with sort of a Beatles haircut) is having a picnic with a woman (princess?), and serving her a variety of modern American food, like "fried chicken from Kentucky" and "baked beans from Boston".

The hero is at odds with the kingdom's wizard, and is in the wizard's alchemy lab. While the wizard looks on dubiously, the hero mixes various ingredients with various instruments in the lab, and finally produces a chunk of gold, to the wizard's amazement.

This last memory is the fuzziest; things come to a head between the hero and the wizard, and they have some sort of duel where the wizard performs a spell, and there's a bright flash, and the hero appears to be destroyed but is actually OK.

Any ideas??

It doesn't match any "Connecticut Yankee" adaptations I've found, and my memories of the alchemy scene in particular make me wonder if the hero is actually some sort of alien or supernatural being or something.

posted by luvcraft to Media & Arts (6 answers total)

Response by poster: There's a slight chance that these might be two different movies; I had the second and third memories first, and then a few years later I saw a movie flipping channels and thought "Oh! This is that movie I remember!" and that's when I saw the picnic scene. That's also why the picnic memory is the clearest; I was a few years older when I saw it.
posted by luvcraft at 11:45 AM on July 9, 2020

Is it possible it wasn't a movie, but rather something like an episode of Doctor Who? The blond Beatles hair makes me wonder if it was the 5th Doctor.
posted by ohheh at 11:55 AM on July 9, 2020

I'm sure you've already checked, but just in case - there's a scene A Kid in King Arthur's Court where the kid makes the princess a whopper or a big mac. Could your memory be confusing a 90's teen hearthrob middle-part with a Beatles mop top?
posted by Think_Long at 11:58 AM on July 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

Could it have been not a "Beatles Haircut", but a famous mullet, in Good Knight, MacGyver ?
posted by jozxyqk at 12:00 PM on July 9, 2020

Response by poster: Pretty sure it wasn't Doctor Who; I was already a big Doctor Who fan at the time, and I think I would've recognized it.

The 90s ones are too late; I definitely saw it in the early-to-mid 80s.
posted by luvcraft at 1:35 PM on July 9, 2020

Best answer: Reddit found it! It's "The Mysterious Stranger" from 1982

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suBwgkhNIKA
posted by luvcraft at 7:50 PM on July 12, 2020 [2 favorites]