"Greetings Starfighter, You have been recruited by the Star League to defend The Frontier, against Xur and the Kodan Armada"
Those words are emblazoned in my brain just like the Pledge of Allegiance. I couldn't wait to revisit the Starlite, Starbrite trailer park, or travel with Centauri to Rylos where he could put me in my very own Gunstar spaceship.
Oh wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. This forgotten piece of science fiction gold, was released in 1984. It was directed by Nick Castle, and starred Lance Guest and the late Robert Preston (in his final film role). This film's claim to sci-fi fame is that it was one of the first films (if not the first) to heavily feature CGI (computer-generated imagery) for its special effects. Star Wars used some in a practical sense, but to the scale of Starfighter or Tron. But I didn't see Tron until college, and besides I was deeply invested in the Starfighter universe.
It is common for any young child to place himself firmly into an engaging movie's canon. But this movie trumped them all for me. I mean come on the male lead's name is Alex Rogan. Yeah thats right, the main reason I loved this movie at all is because I shared the same first name with the main character. That sounds very flimsy, but I couldn't have been older than five when we saw the movie. And besides I have an older brother named Luke, who had THE effing Jedi Knight to share a first name with. Now I've never asked him if he ever grew tired of people joking that they "are his father" or reminding him to "use the force," but if he identified with that Tatooine-farmer-turned-intergalactic-hero even one iota as much as I hero-worshipped Alex Rogan, then I might be his best man, dressed as Boba Fett, at this Star Wars-themed wedding at the Skywalker ranch.
There are three things about this movie that I will always geek out about: the idea of the "Beta" unit, Centauri the alien's removable face, and a car that turns into a spaceship.
When Alex meets Centauri, he shakes hands with Beta in the back-seat, who then becomes a carbon copy of Alex to take his place as he's off the pilot his Gunstar. What sets this film light years ahead of other sci-fi films is the struggles of this robot to assimilate into a tumbleweed trailer park. When I was younger, the scene when he takes off his own head to adjust his ear blew my mind... Funny that watching it now I recognize that there's simply a hole in the desk, for Guest to stick his head out of.
The comic relief provided by Beta is terrific. The biggest thing he can't figure out is how to interact with Alex's girlfriend Maggie (played by Catherine Mary Stewart, before her turn in Weekend at Bernie's). All the couples go up to Silver Lake to fool around, and he's as clueless as a virgin on prom night. So uses his super-hearing to copycat what the lothario Blake says to his girl. Hilarity ensues. Robots are always funny; Just look at Threepio and R-2.
PG movie.... Alien that removes his human-face to clean it enroute to Space city... red glowing eyes... priceless. Nuff said.
And of course there's Centauri's space car. A full year before Doc Brown makes the Delorean hip again in Back to the Future, Robert Preston shows up with a car with wing doors himself. And get this... its actually a spaceship. When the brake lights peeled back to reveal the rockets beneath, I was hooked. Then again I was five or so, so it didn't take much.
As the movie wraps up, I've found that it doesn't hold up well. Thats not to say that I don't still enjoy it, but that now having studied film off-and-on, I see all of the terrible holes in the movie. The way it still works is in reminding me how simple my taste in movies used to be. I was hooked in to this almost solely by the main character's name. And now I'm a diehard sci-fi fan. Imagine how I would have turned out if I had seen A Clockwork Orange instead?
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