Cy Roth certainly tried to pad out his idea into something that kinda-sorta looks like a feature-length film.
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We can agree that all these movies are thinner than a bowl of water. For indie projects like MAGG this is understandable (if not excusable). But for things that obviously had large production budgets and big studio support like The Bubble, or The Day Time Ended? At some point someone should have taken the director and producer to a corner and slapped them upside the head. These were big productions so you’d think they’d at least have come up with a basic, competent plot before they started shooting.
But then again … by all accounts Marvel Phase 4-5, Rings of Power, and a ton of other modern projects are operating with even bigger budgets and are entirely flying by the seat of their pants and relying on reshoots and making things up as they go so it isn’t like this kind of crap doesn’t still happen. Sigh.
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“Everyone on the ice! It’s All Skate!”
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I think that part was intended as damage control. “You’ve probably heard that the planes fail and crash, but we’re going to repeatedly make the point that it’s a matter of pilot error. Train them properly and make sure they follow reasonable safety guidelines and we promise the planes will be fine. Why can’t people just believe that?”
It’s not the best pitch. It didn’t actually succeed. But the movie was made because the planes already had a bad reputation and weren’t selling, and they couldn’t get away with not addressing that.
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Indeed. The Air Force didn’t want the 104, and didn’t cooperate with the making of the film. That’s why it’s full of hot, refueling, stock footage action.
With those little sharp wings, it looked like a fish, moved like a fish, steered like a cow (with apologies to Douglas Adams).
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The Starfighters has too much plot for what it is. A commercial. Editing it down to a nice 30-second spot would be hard.
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Or at least. “Yes, the plane will crash. But any landing you walk away from is a good landing. And a higher percentage of pilots walk away from Starfighter crashes than other jet fighter crashes.”
Which was actually true.
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Well, you know, practice makes perfect.
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It was ahead of its time in that way. Mattel really made it work when they created He-Man, a 24 minute commercial for an entire toy line, with its own commercial breaks.
But, yeah. The film is really hobbled by only being allowed to use stock footage from the training grounds. There’s the scene with the cast being shown how sharp the wings are (which is actually a bug, not a feature) and there are shots of them sitting in the cockpit (while the plane is actually on the ground). But everything else that shows a plane is stock footage. It’s really hard to make that into either a movie or a commercial, let alone both.
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