There’s a scene in “The Rocketeer,” Disney’s big budget would-be blockbuster from the summer of 1991, that ranks among the most profoundly strange and transfixing moments in the studio’s storied history.
The scene, which takes place in 1938, unfolds right before the movie’s big, fiery climax at L.A.’s Griffith Observatory. Our hero, L.A. stunt pilot-turned-makeshift-superhero Cliff Secord (Billy Campbell) is in the office of Howard Hughes (a perfectly cast Terry O’Quinn). Hughes, it turns out, is the inventor of an experimental rocket pack that Secord has happened upon and utilized in a series of exciting action sequences. The FBI is there too.