10 Things to Know About 'The Last Starfighter' (1984) Starring Lance Guest and Robert Preston

I adore The Last Starfighter. I wish I would have seen it on the big screen but, I was lucky enough to wear out the VHS copy once I had the chance to see it. The story is absolute gold for 12 year old boys who grew up playing Atari games and loving Star Wars.

The premise finds Alex Rogan (Lance Guest) living an unremarkable life in a trailer park and living for the times he can play his favorite arcade game, The Last Starfighter. What he doesn't know is that the game is secretly a recruitment tool for an alien species locked in a long time war and in need of new starfighters.

When Alex beats the game, a man named Centauri (Robert Preston) arrives and takes him on a life or death adventure in space. Meanwhile, a robot duplicate of Alex is left behind to live his life and creates comic chaos. The humor of The Last Starfighter sets it apart from other similar 80s sci-fi and if the marketing had really told people how much fun the movie was instead of trying to be another Star Wars, it might have become a much bigger hit.

As it is, The Last Starfighter made money, around $28 million against a $15million dollar budget. Solid but far below what was needed to give the film a legacy and a chance for sequels.

Here's 10 Things to Know About The Last Starfighter

10 The Reshoots

Many movies go in for reshoots and The Last Starfighter is no exception. The film initially completed production in August of 1983. Then, in December of that year, the stars and crew were called back together for reshoots and this wasn’t merely for pick-ups. Stars Robert Preston, Dan O’Herlihy, and Lance Guest were joined by hundreds of alien extras for reshoots of a scene set on a distant planet.

The reshoots weren’t easy. O’Herlihy had to go back into a five hour makeup session and, by the time the reshoots were official, Lance Guest had cut his hair and was forced to wear a rather obvious wig.

9 Galoob Made Toys for The Last Starfighter that Never Made it to Stores

Why would a toy company go to the trouble of planning a multi-million dollar campaign for a toy line only to scrap the toyline entirely? We don’t really know but we do know that it happened for the toys made for The Last Starfighter. After the film was screened for test audiences and didn’t get a strong reaction from audiences, Galoob scrapped their plans for The Last Starfighter figures and other such toys.

We do know that these toys existed thanks to a 2017 discovery in someone’s California garage. A group of 12 test figures were located and sold to a toy shop which then placed them on display. A famed toy expert, Blake Wright, then confirmed they were real based on information from Galoob internal memos and the standard practice of making test figures based on previous molds, in this case, molds used to make the M.A.S.H figures set from Mego, a thing that also really did exist and were sold in stores.

8 Even more money and time went into The Last Starfighter video game that never happened

Atari put incredible time and effort into making a The Last Starfighter video game based on the arcade game in the movie. The technology to create a game using the kind of graphics seen in the film didn’t exist outside of the animation created for the movie. Atari then spent loads of money and time developing technology that could create something similar to the arcade version and they did it, they made the game.

Then, Atari executives saw The Last Starfighter and dropped their plans. All contemporary reports indicate Atari executives didn’t think the movie would become a hit so they scrapped the title and repurposed the game tech. The game was at least 75 percent complete, to the point where emulator versions of the game have popped up online. Atari didn’t throw out the development, just the name. The game tech became the 8 bit game Star Raiders 2 and the Atari 2600 title Solaris.

7 If the name of director Nick Castle sounds familiar, you must be a horror movie fan

Director Nick Castle has been on both sides of the camera and part of just about every aspect of the filmmaking world. He was an extra, a camera operator, a cinematographer, a screenwriter (Escape from New York), and, most notably, he was the masked version of Michael Myers/The Shape in John Carpenter’s Halloween.

6 Lance Guest Won the Lead Role in The Last Starfighter thanks to Halloween 2

Not only was director Nick Castle part of the fabric of the Halloween franchise, so was his The Last Starfighter star, Lance Guest. Guest played Jimmy in Halloween 2 and when Nick Castle saw the film, he called John Carpenter to ask about the young actor who played Jimmy. And the rest was history,

5 Final Feature Film Appearance for Robert Preston

After years of being told to tone it down, Robert Preston was told to turn up his campy act to 11 as Centauri in The Last Starfighter and he did not disappoint. Preston appears to be having a ball playing Centauri and his Henry Hill-The Music Man energy gives The Last Starfighter an energy it desperately needs to escape some of the Star Wars comparisons that dogged it on release.

Sadly, this would be the last feature film in the career of Robert Preston who would pass away just 5 years later, his final two roles being long forgotten TV movies. But, at the very least, Preston had a ball making The Last Starfighter and he’s terrific in the movie.

Director Nick Castle in an Associated Press interview prior to release told a wonderful anecdote about watching one of Preston's first takes while filming and getting to tell the famously hammy Preston to go even bigger on his spiel to get this kid to come to space with him.

According to Castle, Preston's eyes lit up and the next take was a pure joy for everyone on set. Watching these scenes today is like seeing, for just a moment, Professor Henry Hill coming to modern day 1984, a gleam in his eye and a scheme on the make. He does everyhing short of breaking out into song.

4 The Film Title Has an Unfortunate Association in Canada

While The Last Starfighter was in production, Canada suffered the crash of not one but two of their Starfighter Fighter jets, the CF-104 Starfighter, in less than one month. First, a Starfighter crashed while participating in an Air Show in West Germany. Less than a month later, a second Starfighter crashed into a French mountainside while on a training mission.

The crashes made headlines around the world but it was likely too late for anyone on The Last Starfighter to consider a title change. There doesn’t appear to have been any controversy over the title, it was just a coincidence after all, but it certainly had to give producers a brief moment of panic to have the name of their film even coincidentally attached to a pair of tragedies, even tragedies half a world away.

3 The Last Starfighter Was Made Possible by J.R Ewing?

It’s true, The Last Starfighter was produced by Lorimar Productions, the same company that made millions creating a television empire valued at more than $200 million dollars by 1983 and it was only growing with the launch of the series Eight is Enough, another ratings bonanza. Thus, putting forward a $15 million dollar budget for The Last Starfighter wasn’t much of a risk for Lorimar, even as their movie division had suffered more than $20 million dollars in write-offs in the previous year.

2 Lance Guest spent 10 to 12 Hours a Day Shooting By Himself for Some of the Big Special Effects Scenes

At the time, the special effects in The Last Starfighter were on the cutting edge of film technology but the leap forward in technology came with new challenges for the actors, specifically star Lance Guest. In order to film the scenes in which he was flying his Starfighter, he was all alone for 10 to 12 hours a day to get everything just right for the effects to work.

He often had no other actors to work off of according to director Nick Castle and it forced Guest to dig down deep to stay in the moment as an actor.

1 Shooting Scenes on the lot of MGM Was Something Special for Director Nick Castle

The Last Starfighter shot a good number of its big set pieces on an MGM soundstage. In fact, the film used the same soundstage as one Nick himself grew up on. Castle’s father, Nick Castle Sr. was a choreographer in the Golden Era of the MGM musical. He brought young Nick to work with him on several occasions, including when he acted as choreographer for Summer Stock starring Judy Garland and Gene Kelly which filmed on the same soundstage as The Last Starfighter, more than 30 years later.