LEGO Ideas Feature: The Last Starfighter By TheBrickBang

This week’s LEGO Ideas Feature is brought to you by TheBrickBang and their incredibly retro hark back to the 80’s with The Last Starfighter!

I can’t believe this project has passed me by, it only has 31 days left (at the time of publishing this article) and I’m afraid it won’t make the next milestone. Being a massive fan of the movie, which I saw when I was a child, it gripped me in a way that I had never experienced before, or since to be perfectly honest. It follows Alex Rogan, an expert video game player who lives in a trailer park and has no promising future. One day he meets Centauri, an alien ranger, who wants to recruit him as a Starfighter pilot – and the rest is history as they say.

The creator has done an amazing job in translating both the characters into Minifigure form and the Gunstar One ship out of LEGO bricks. From the pointy cockpit to the bulky engines and weapons at the back, the ship looks incredible and one I would totally love to have on display in my collection. 

Being born the same year this movie released, 1984, I obviously didn’t watch it until later in life, but that doesn’t mean I love it even less. I can still remember a good chunk of the movie and some of the lines, it’s very much relevant now as it was when I first saw it, being a big gaming fan too it means even more to me. Yes, I’ve thought the same would happen to me if I played my best!

The Last Starfighter tells the story of a trailer-park teen, Alex Rogan, who gets recruited by the Star League (an alien defense force) to defend Rylos and “the Frontier” against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada.

The Minifigures are awesome and two I’d love to have in my collection. TheBrickBang has done a great job it capturing both the characters and their retro Space suits, with the pastel blue underlay, the tubes and the Starfighters badge. The heads look spot in too, although Alex has a yellow head and a somewhat generic expression. Grig, Alex’s co-pilot, looks spot on with his Alien face and matching Space suit, it makes me want to have this as a real set even more!

Why should LEGO create The Last Starfighter (not just 80s nostalgia)

The Last Starfighter was the first film to incorporate groundbreaking CGI effects rather than traditional physical models. Rendering the 25 minutes of space shots took over 2 years on a CRAY supercomputer.