The Last Flight of Noah's Ark (1980)

[Archivist]

The 2021 movie Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle drew recent attention to the Japanese soldiers who held out on Pacific and SE Asia islands after World War II. Cut off from communication, they did not know the war had ended, and continued their duties, in one case for decades, returning in 1974.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_holdout

Only six years after in 1980, Disney produced Last Flight of Noah's Ark, a lesser known family movie that came from the same era as The Black Hole (1979), Condorman (1981) and Herbie Goes Bananas (1980). I saw this on the Wonderful World of Disney some time in the 80s. It covers the Japanese soldier story from another angle, that of a B52 bomber carrying livestock that crash landed on one such island. The occupants of the plane meet two Japanese soldiers who are unaware of the end of the war, and they eventually become friends.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhojNP79Ags

They create a plan to get off the island, blowing the wings off the plane and sealing the holes as best they can, and use the soldier's Japanese flag for part of the sail.

Footage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ecFgmDSr34

The Last Flight of Noah's Ark can be seen on Amazon, Netflix, Plex and a few other streaming services. I haven't seen it since the 80s, so it will be fun to catch up with it.

[Dr. Whom]

I was a kid in the late 70s, and at least in the Franco-belgian sphere, the lost Japanese soldier who kept on fighting was quite the trope in comics. If there was a remote island in the Pacific, you'd be sure to bump into some Japanese.

[M.10rda]

Yeah, that trope shows up in multiple late 70s and 80s bad movies.