When The Last Starfighter hit theaters in 1984, it helped bring to life the fantasy of every arcade fanatic at the time — that someone would see you’re really good at arcade games and give you a job. When Alex Rogan beat the record top score on Starfighter, he’s whisked away by Henry Hill from The Music Man in his Space DeLorean to fight evil aliens and save the universe. The film was a modest hit and since then has inspired a real-life video game, comic books, plenty of sequel rumors and even an off-Broadway musical. Now the film’s creator wants to turn it into a TV show.
The Starfighter Chronicles is a work-in-progress concept that creator Jonathan Betuel is putting together with Surreal.TV — a company that aims to augment traditional storytelling methods with virtual reality. The idea is to create a show about “alien law enforcement” (as opposed to a sequel to the movie) to be shown on standard television. However, there will be elements of the show that will take advantage of virtual reality headsets — being able to look around the cockpit of a space fighter, for example.
For now, it’s just in the planning stages, although Betuel has shopped the concept around the various studios. We’ll see if war is raged with the Ko-Dan Armada once again.
(Via Arcade Museum, Variety and surreal.tv)