The Reluctant Astronaut was a vehicle for comedian Don Knotts. Don Knotts was a stand-up comic from the early era of live-television who had found fame as Deputy Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show (1960-8). Knotts starred in a handful of films throughout the 1960s – The Incredible Mr Limpet (1964), The Ghost and Mrs Chicken (1965) and The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968).

The Reluctant Astronaut is a hardly inspiring entry in this comic space launch mini-genre. It’s not even, for the most part, a space launch comedy, rather is a series of knockabout antics at a space launch center. The greater part of the comedy in fact seems to centre around the scarcely electrifying theme of Don Knotts’ inability to tell friends and family that he is only a janitor and not an astronaut and the confusions that result. There are a lot of lacklustre slapstick scenes set around Knotts slapping people in the face with a mop over his shoulder, bumbling into wind tunnels and rocket sleds, turning on the air conditioning inside a space suit and so forth. There’s a lot here that could’ve been hysterical if enacted by say a Charlie Chaplin or even a Jerry Lewis, but the film’s criminal mistake is to never keep pushing the gags to a necessary level of surreal dementia or agony. The bug-eyed, elastic-faced Don Knotts gives a performance that almost entirely consists of hapless hangdog double-takes. Where the film does actually briefly become funny is during the space launch in the last 15 minutes, which features the appealing image of Don Knotts sitting in a chair and grabbing crackers as they float past then reaching out to spread them with floating squirts of peanut butter.