The wife convinced me to watch the next installment in our Star Wars saga (The Force Awakens) so I am cutting it close tonight and this will be a quick one. Watching Star Wars movies always gives me a rush of nostalgia even with the newer movies. I watched a lot of Sci-Fi growing up as that genre along with Westerns and War movies were my dad’s bread and butter flicks (and he pretty much set the programing in our house). One of my favorites followed Alex Rogan a small town guy video game wiz who unexpectedly gets requirement to fight in a galactic war he knows nothing about.
The Last Star Fighter was released in 1984 and I was too young to watch it until it had aged a little but even in the late 80s it’s use of early CGI captured my imagination. Along with Tron and The Black Hole it appeared Disney was an early adopter of what has now become a main stay in movies. Add to that I, like most kids my age, was addicted to my Nintendo and was an avid video gamer. Another big selling points for me was the concept that a young man living in a trailer park (which to my perspective was just about the only people poorer than we were) could rise above his situation to something grand.
In the movie Alex has all kinds of rotten luck but take solace in playing this video console cabinet game aptly named Starfighter. After breaking the high score he is approached by Centauri (Robert Preston from The Music Man) an alien who clues him into the real reason behind the game. It was a recruiting tool to find lifeforms with the skill necessary to save Rylos a planet besieged by the Ko-Dan Empire. As you can imagine with an 80s Sci-Fi there are some seemingly unnecessary plot twists like his body double android named Beta fowling things up with Alex’s girlfriend back on Earth but in the end our hero wins the day and returns home landing his spaceship in the trailer park. Everyone comes to marvel at him and he reconnects with Maggie his girlfriend. This movie is brimming with nostalgia for me and although I haven’t seen it in years I still smile every time I think about it.
There was something about that tag line that gave me tingles and provided a rush of adventure to this day. Greetings, Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-dan Armada.
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