From Box Office Bomb to Cult Beloved: The Story of The Last Starfighter 

You were right. The ship STILL looks cool.

Thinking? It is cool

The 'Death Blossom' was always SO effin' cool!

@@Logan7281X - The only thing I was disappointed with as a kid was the Death Blossom - the way they described it didn't end up on screen as impressive as it was in my head. :) Loved the film as a kid, though.

I thought it was cool as a 30 something. Saw it twice though I think the second time was on VCR.

"No, MY slaughter!"

My favorite line. What do we do now? *visor slowly closes over dudes eye* We.... D I E

"Go back to sleep or I'll tell mom about your playboys."

@@fightclubhubbs lol Lewis was such a cad, i wanna know where he got those though, i mean there's no dad in the mix... was "mom" a lesbian? o.o

@@UltimateGamerCC Kids/teens are very resourceful. In the time before the internet was a thing believe me if you could find something like that they would inevitably get their hands on it one way or the other.

Yessss. Same. It was this and Legend of Billie Jean Gray for me!

I bought the Special Edition DVD... So I'm with you!

Me too brother

ya if I ever see it on tv I have to stop and watch it.

Yes bro we had this tapped off tv and the movie with kids as gangsters with potato guns lol😂✌️🇳🇿

Love that little eyepiece rotating into place before he says that

@@Beardedvikingweirdo 🧐

Haha I literally just posted that. Classic.

This is THE line I quoted over and over as a kid - with a makeshift space monocle and all! Made with a piece of Transformer decoder film, naturally.

.in 1995 the R ZONE Video game was released. It was a small scene Right in front of one of your eyes. Then there is the “scouter” that Vegeta wear in dragon ball Z. Obviously it was an idea that what is shown in Star Wars episode four back in 1977, In the X Wing And then worn by Bobo Fett, But the use Last Starfighter in So cool. The way it moves in place and then turns down. Perfect

It is great. It’s also very inspired by the original BSG theme.

That brass section.

I would watch a movie like that. Lol

@@kevinwr7093 OK Now I want a movie based on Rygar.

I used to hustle older kids on Street fighter. My mom caught me when I had 200 bucks in my Alf wallet.

Gauntlet. Lock your bikes to the rack and bring a bag of quarters. This is gonna take all day, and it will be glorious.

This but, in my case, change Golden Axe for Cadillacs and Dinosaurs.

Given the same chance you can bet your bottom dollar I'ma stick with the ship, Earth is a mess anyway

@@UNSCPILOT half of earth is a mess. The other half of us just dont have power to stop it

He took his hooker though, right?

If not more so.

Went to a showing a few years ago, parents brought their kids. :)

It certainly is. I do fear that someone will try and remake it though.

epic scene

The Author of Ready Player One even based his second book around a similar premise of an arcade game as recruitment tool for an intergalactic war.

I used to get rolls of quarters from the bank, and play it all day!

lol I love it.

And every time you watch it, that theme will be stuck in your head for a goddamn week. DAT dada DAT, DAT dada DAT, dah daah daaahh...

Craig Safan doesn't get nearly enough credit, his score is incredibly bombastic and dramatic, it fits the visuals so well. His music reminds me of Alan Silvestri, especially his score for Back To The Future, which was only released a year later.

@@chindleymuffin his Remo Williams score is exceptional too

For real! I'd LOVE to have some of them. Especially the ship. It's one of my favorite ship deisngs.

Yeah a good Gunstar model is up there on my wishlist with Battletech/Mechwarrior gunpla and decent models for the Brynhild and Hyperion from Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

It makes sense, all the kids who were kids when this movie came out aren’t kids. And adults don’t need toys

I wish a games company would make a real The Last Starfighter arcade game.

@@jublywubly Atari made a working prototype shorty after the movie release. It was deemed too expensive since it ran on custom hardware. It is playable in MAME.

"No, MY slaughter!"

Who knew Grig was Norse.

Alex: "In another dimension? Well, how many are left?" Grig: "Including yourself?" Alex: "Yes." Grig: "One." Alex: "One?!?!?"

Yes. It has a good script. A thing Hollywood does not care about now.

I agree with all of this.

Some of the dated stuff makes it kitchy and fun though.

As a general rule, a movie has to make 3X it's production budget to be considered profitable.

My thoughts exactly

🙌🏾

Get Ready!

Yes!! 💙💗

Stefan Amaris grins maniacally.

Sounds like a job for the corridor crew

@@dontfeedthelunatic I have been making the same comment here.

"Someone could" Nothing comes for free.

@@dontfeedthelunatic Bunch of hacks tbh. Not very popular with a lot of VFX guys. Got so bad over at CGSociety that people told them to fuck off for good.

Agree, though I might be interested to see what it looks like with contemporary DVFX replacing the 80's VFX, like (and its scary to say this) how Lucas redid the X-wing attack on the deathstar

Yes. Chemistry between costars helps to give a movie the right magic. A remake would do what all current movies do: pour money into the CGI, change the story and hire a bunch of stars to say the lines with zero feeling.

But if Lance Guest is still alive a sequel would be pretty cool seeing him as a veteran maybe in the Centari role of going back to Earth with the arcade game in todays age to find another human who is good enough like he was. There is still a lot to be told to this story. The rendered art in this video looks amazing and if Seth Rogan can get the rights lined up I think this could be an incredible sequel. They don't need to recon the thing or redo anything. Like the Tron Sequel just continue the story. Lord knows there are enough origin stories when there doesn't need to be. Maybe a black kid or Indian kid who happens to be great at video games but is social awkward. It doesn't have to be woke just a strong story. Imagine Alex going around the world putting the arcade games out their to see who the 1 person is who could beat that game or multiple people to train as Star Fighters kind of a like a TOP GUN 2 if the film ever gets released. The film was fun and had promise how many of todays films have that feel to them?

Gotta agree with you bud I loved that movie as a kid

they do need to make a new computer game for it, where, as you go through the game, your number of wingmen declines, until you finally fight the Kodan Armada alone

Hey me too. It is a profile shot of him at the arcade machine with the cat on top, but it is all silhouette except for the writing on the side of the game cabinet

I agree 1000%.

With the current trend in Hollywood of inserting "current year" and identity politics into every single thing, I would rather not have a reboot.

Corridor Crew: Hold my beer...

@KRYO BOY NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! Demonic Disney destroys classics again...

@KRYO BOY hahahahhahahahhahhahahhahha

I had such a crush on Catherine Mary Stewart after seeing it in the theater, had to wait a few years before getting it on VHS.

Then you tell him Michael Myers made it.

And Lance Guest was in Halloween 2, so there's a 2nd thing connecting the movies. Cheers.

Hah, the Winchester Mystery House. I went there when I was living in Palo Alto. Where do you stay?

"the Winchester Mystery House" ? After reading Alan Moore's Swamp Thing story about the house, I eventually thought that Winchester's widow and Jimmy Carter were doing the same thing with all of the building they were doing.

That's where I saw it too, great place to see movies, all gone now I think.

@@calstongroup Thing that amused me about those Century Theaters is before he became "The Last Starfighter" Lance worked at that theater. So he went from theater worker to having his name at the top of the marquee.

@@grahamcann1761 I never knew that !!! I hope he's doing well. It's funny, Bill Hader used to work at the theater I used to frequent here in Tempe.

Kevin Smith loves his obscure pop culture shout outs.

"Why are we walking like this??"

@@Gabriel_Cook nobody else would be bold enough to have a flashback episode as the second episode

Yeah, I wondered about that at the time, not realizing the movie was a flop. Funny thing is, I ended up buying the Atari 2600 game Solaris. I didn't know until watching this video that Solaris was meant to be a Last Starfighter game. I loved that game and it's probably the most technically impressive game on the system... But it is the Atari 2600, so even saying that, it can't really do justice to the movie.

There was a indy homebrew game made based on the arcade game but I'm not sure if it's still out there

@@LF-X I played it.. But its super slow due to its programming

I remember watching this on VHS back in the day and the CGI in it was so rudimentary that it really looked like cel animation on that medium. Even though I found out pretty early on that it was CG, it wasn't until I watched the 25th anniversary edition that I could properly see that it was CG. edit: I should also point out that the televisions back then also played a big role in screwing over the visual fidelity of stuff too, so it wasn't just the compression found in VHS tapes.

This was 1990s-quality CGI ... done in 1984.

TLS, Condor Man, Flight of the Navigator, Ice Pirates - these things consumed my dreams and hit the kid cylinders. Star Wars hogs the cultural spotlight, but these lesser known gems were just as good to kids with imaginations.

@@turinmortis2376 Flight of the navigator is a classic.

@@turinmortis2376 Tron, Flash Gordon, Dune, Enemy Mine, Outland... It feels like the early 80s was full of inventive, boundary-pushing sci-fi movies; an era when genuinely cool concepts got given sizeable FX budgets and A-List casts to make memorable films that almost all tanked at the box office, mainly for a lack of lightsabers and Ewoks.

Loved this movie whenever I’d catch it on cable as a little kid.

I have to ask. Would it be worth having to watch a terrible remake?

I looked thru the comments for just this moment, gadam that scene scared and creeped me out. Yet the humour, fun and excitement kept me riveted. Loved it at the time and great to relive it through this. Cheers mate 👨🏼‍🚀👍🏼

Because it was a reskin of a crap game.

I hadn't thought about that. He seemed to actually like his neighbors.

Reminds me of watching the 1989 Batman on Blu-ray and seeing all the Styrofoam on the sets.

When I was watching Star Wars, I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen on screen. I almost wanted my own Millennium Falcon more than I wanted my own Enterprise. When Luke finally climbs down into the gun turret on the Falcon my 8-year-old brain was all, "I want to be Luke Skywalker when I grow up!" Then, I was 14 when Starfighter came out, and this character WAS me: annoying little brother, looking ahead to a college education my parents were not going to be able to afford, crushing on a gorgeous brunette who'd been my friend since before kindergarten but still hung out with the jocks because they had money and cars, total videogame addict. There's no way I could not love this movie. It's totally my life if I could turn it into a science fiction story.

What you needed was a cheaper TV. :)

I can’t imagine how you’d do the Death Blossom combat engagement using physical models.

@@Ryan_Christopher It would have just been presented differently. In the CGI, they show the ship flipping and twisting at high speeds, but you could easily just present it differently. The first thing that comes to mind is how Star Trek The Motion Picture presented the wormhole with all the trippy time dilation effects, “Tooorrrrpppppeeeeedddddoooo aaaawwwwwaaaaayyyyy!!!!!”

@@Ryan_Christopher Oh! I just had a good idea of how to do it with the miniature. Just take still photos of the miniature 360 degree by 360 degree with 360 degree rotation around the camera axis. Then just animate the action with the cells you’ve photographed.

There is a sequel in the works, surprised he didn't mention it: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-tAvN9000o4A.html

@@pawned79 You’ve only animated the Gunstar in that method. The Blaster and the Missile shots cannot all follow the same trajectories since the enemies were also maneuvering.

"...to defend the frontier..."

I wish

E.T. and Cloak and Dagger had the same awesome child star "Henry Thomas"!!

@@charliepotatoes001 Indeed he was. If you are in to scary stuff, grown-up Henry Thomas is in the mini-series The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix. It's good and I was glad to see him acting again.

80’s & 90’s were amazing,so glad I had my childhood & teens then👍👍

There are plans to do a sequel to TLSF.

ANOTHER DIMENSION?!?!

@@maxcooper6554 Well, now, don't you tell me to smile You stick around I'll make it worth your while

Kids see the world through a different lens. There was a mighty fortress behind my apartment building, with a magical transparent roof and lots of secret tunnels. It was ACTUALLY a pile of cinderblocks and sandbags covered with a plastic drop cloth, being used by a construction company across the alley. I like the kid version of reality better...

Check out Armada by Ernst Cline.....

Just imagine a real intergalactic space army saying things like "Would you like to get a gold skin for your spaceship? On sale today only for $8.99! Upgrade your lasers with our battle pass, $14.99 for the whole season!"

Ooo, you must rolled well on that particular Will save. That would have been a high DC for me.

@@TrueYellowDart It was definitely tempting! I didn't want him to go Death Blossom on me 😂

Armada. Xur and the Kodan Armada. :)

You are thinking of xur scepter

Because dad's are always right they always know your favorite stuff

American Werewolf In London is a classic. The Slaughtered Lamb, remember The Alamo.

@@acidphaze 😂 brilliant pub scene .. I loved that film. I only found out about those tragic deaths on the twilight zone movie set recently. That's what stopped John Landis from becoming one of the top directors, werewolf was definitely his best.

Yikes! *I* was 13 when it came out! (Where does the time go... :-/ ) One of the very special things about this film was how honestly it tapped into the general malaise & ennui that us GenX'ers were already beginning to be known for. Also its message of, 'Though your talent may seem strange & possibly even trivial, there will come a time when it will matter more than you can imagine.' Was really heartfelt & resonated with many of us Geeks (Before 'Geek' became cool.)