Lance Guest Robert Preston Dan O'Herlihy

A video-gaming boy, seemingly doomed to stay at his trailer park home all his life, finds himself recruited as a gunner for an alien defense force.

Story: Alex Rogan lives in a trailer court where his mother is manager and everyone is like a big extended family. He beats the Starfighter video game to the applause of everyone in the court and later that day finds he has been turned down for a student loan for college. Depressed, he meets Centauri, who introduces himself as a person from the company that made the game, before Alex really knows what is going on he is on the ride of his life in a "car" flying through space. Chosen to take the skills he showed on the video game into real combat to protect the galaxy from an invasion. Alex gets as far as the Starfighter base before he really realized that he was conscripted and requests to be taken back home. When he gets back home, he finds a Zando-Zan (alien bounty hunter) is stalking him. Unable to go home and live, Alex returns to the Starfighter base to find all the pilots have been killed and he is the galaxy's only chance to be saved from invasion...

Did you know: A lot of the scenes with the Beta Unit were shot after main filming was complete because the test audience liked the comic relief of the Beta Unit scenes and the director decided they added more originality to the "boy gets to go to outer space" story. This is why in many of the Beta Unit scenes Lance Guest is obviously wearing a wig - he had cut his hair by the time those scenes were shot.