The Last Starfighter was a big movie for me when I was a kid, primarily because it allowed me to imagine a world in which the hours I spent playing Final Fight down at the 7-11 essentially qualified as a trade school. The 1984 film, directed by John Carpenter's longtime collaborator Nick Castle, stars Lance Guest as Alex Rogan, a seemingly directionless teenager living in a trailer park and spending his free time pumping quarters into a space-shooter arcade game called Starfighter. The “game” turns out to be a training simulator / mobile auditioning studio placed on Earth by a race of aliens to recruit pilots for their intergalactic fleet, and the game’s designer Centauri (Robert Preston) beams down to carry Alex up into the stars to fight in a war to save the galaxy from an evil empire. It fully rules. And now, 37 years later, we might finally get a sequel.
Screenwriter Gary Whitta (The Book of Eli, Star Wars Rebels, Rogue One), who also hosts the popular Animal Crossing: New Horizons in-game talk show Animal Talking, uploaded a four-minute sizzle reel to his YouTube account pitching a potential sequel titled The Last Starfighters. Whitta also shared the video on his Twitter account:
The footage consists of concept art by Matt Allsopp (Godzilla, The Force Awakens), fleshing out a new story by Whitta and The Last Starfighter screenwriter Jonathan Betuel and accompanied by selections from the original movie’s score composed by Craig Safan and newly recorded by Chris Tilton. As best I can tell, it appears as though the sequel would begin with an alien landing on Earth and attempting to assassinate Alex, who still lives at the same old trailer park with his wife (presumably his girlfriend Maggie from the original) and their two teenage kids. Alex and Probably Maggie obliterate the would-be killer with some hidden space weaponry of their own, and Alex sets off in his spaceship to return to the Rylan Star League and find out what the heck is going on.
Allsopp’s artwork is gorgeous, promising some rad new spaceship designs, an impressive space station that somewhat resembles the titular Halo Array from the Halo series (or the titular Elysium from Elysium if you’re some kind of weirdo), and a brand-new water planet that looks like a cross between Star Wars’ Kamino and Avatar’s Pandora. The score perfectly compliments the new concept art; if you grew up watching The Last Starfighter, you will be shouting at the top of your lungs for someone, anyone, to bankroll Whitta and Betuel’s idea for a sequel. Check out the video below.