It always bothered me that The Last Starfighter was never that big a smash among the youth of 1984.
My family never went to the movies when I was a kid, so when it was originally released, I had to make do with the novelization I picked up at a Scholastic Book Fair. I read the tome cover to cover for months until it finally premiered on HBO, fully living up to — and surpassing — my juvenile imagination. (I felt the same way about SpaceCamp, but that’s a different story.)
Teenager Alex (Lance Guest) spends most of his days pushing off his girlfriend, Maggie (Catherine Mary Stewart), to play the only video game at the trailer park, Starfighter. When he finally beats the game, a DeLorean-style space car swoops down and takes him to the farthest reaches of the galaxy to fight evil aliens intent on universal domination.
This movie had everything that would give a kid stuck in a small Texas town some hope to one day escape. Of course, being so young, I didn’t leave for many years, happy enough to just watch this movie for the time being. But, every time I passed the Space Invaders machine in the local diner, that didn’t mean I didn’t give it my damnedest, quarter after quarter, just in case.
Watching the movie some 30-plus years later, that same feeling of astral escape is still present, with believable performances from both Guest and Stewart. And, upon this recent viewing, I was surprised to see Dan O’Herlihy — he of Halloween III, RoboCop and The Whoopee Boys fame — underneath all that makeup as the friendly reptilian navigator Grig.
And while I have come to realize no distant extraterrestrial races have put an arcade game in an inconspicuous spot for intergalactic enlistment as a star warrior, if I see one, I always stop to give it the once-over, because you never know. —Louis Fowler