Considering what it was up against, with a low budget and science fiction being so new in the television world, Earthstar Voyager is an extremely good B movie. We taped it off of TV years ago and even though we didn't tape the beginning of the second part, it still remains a family favorite. Why? It has an exceptional plot, considering what it had to work with (No aliens, no ultra, clichéd bad guys) it's hard to find excitement in space without those, but the movie is able to keep a good pace. Most of this is because of the script, which is very clever, and a cast that was able to click and be believable. Duncan Reghre excels and I must admit that Huxley's character is one of my favorite sci-fi characters ever. Add to these good parts the humor that just being a B movie can add (The exact same shot of the ship used every time, the outfits that the bad guys wear looking like they raided a costume store, etc.)and you've got a pretty fun movie. Unfortunately, unless enough people remember it, it will go down in the vaults as one of "Disney's failures" and never be re-released even on television. If they were to re-release it, however, I see it holding the possibility of becoming quite a cult classic.

I was just out of kindergarten when this was originally broadcast, but someone at my house taped it, and I remember watching it over and over again before the tape was erased. I think this movie must have inspired my long-running interest in science fiction - it had a very strong impression on me when I was young. It had much of the spirit of the novels written by Robert A. Heinlein in the 1950s, which were tight, inspiring futuristic stories about young adults and their adventures in space travel. Like those novels, the future described in this film didn't seem like pulp; it was highly believable. Additionally, this movie has a quality long absent from science fiction: a respect for real scientists and engineers. Unknown to many people, the literary origins of science fiction were attempts to interest young people in science/engineering fields through the medium of fiction. As I read just yesterday, the government is funding a project to promote the sciences in Hollywood films in order to recruit young people to a quickly-dwindling field. Maybe they should re-release "Earth Star Voyager?!"For years, this was in the back of my head, but I just assumed it a completely lost and forgotten TV film until I found bits and pieces of info. about it recently online. I finally found a bootleg of it on ebay from an original video someone had taped back in '88 and decided to relive a part of my childhood. The result: it holds up surprisingly well 17 years later.Reading all the reviews here of people with fond memories of this now-forgotten gem, I realize that the central quality of the movie was its writing and characterizations. The writing especially: as I watched it again, I found myself remembering immediately many lines from this movie which I hadn't heard for years - they were that good. I have long maintained that solid writing and strong characters are the keys to great film-making; special effects and other things are important, too, but these two key ingredients were present here, and that is why I believe people remember this so well almost two decades later. The special effects do hold up rather well - probably because they were the work of Hollywood effects veteran Robert Edlund. Also, film composer Lalo Schifrin contributed what, in my opinion, is his best musical score. In fact, doing some research on IMDb.com, I discovered that the director of this was a seasoned veteran of television going all the way back to "Rawhide" in the 1950s, "The Fugitive", and even a few classic episodes of "Star Trek." The writer was the creator of the TV series "Kung Fu." Obiously, some top-notch talent was involved. It's a shame that none of the actors or actresses went on to significant accomplishments beyond forgettable TV and B-movies - except for Henry Kingi, who played the Borg-like Shell. He is a popular Hollywood stuntman to this day in such films as "Constantine" and "The Matrix Reloaded," and he did display a true presence in ESV. The creativity at work here was definitely on a par with the original "Star Trek" series - another work which had dozens of visionary ideas in addition to memorable characterizations. "Star Trek" eventually got resurrected times ten, and I think Disney is long overdue in releasing this on DVD in the U.S. (which it never did on VHS, either). It seems to me that a great deal more work went into this than the typical forgettable TV pilot (Disney CEO Michael Eisner even appeared in two television introductions on the set), and yet somehow Disney/Buena Vista just abandoned this. I personally emailed the company requesting a release, and received a reply stating that they are taking it into consideration. Hopefully, this has gotten the ball rolling.

This would make fun fan-fiction ... hello fan-fiction writers! Start writing, please!!!I too watched (and recorded) this when it was on TV back in '88. Believe it or not, I still have the video tape. I found it again by accident recently and decided to watch it just for fun. It's a little more corny than I remember it, but still fun. The films biggest problem is all the boyfriend/girlfriend worrying the young crew does. The viewer gets real tired of that really fast! The computer voice was hokey as well. This isn't a widely remembered film, and I've never seen it re-aired. It might work if it was remade, the general plot of the story wasn't bad. It's just one of those made-for-TV '80s films from the Disney Sunday Movie era that ran once and now sits rotting in their vaults. Shame.

Earth Star Voyager is one of those gems of science fiction television that comes once in a blue moon. The characters and storyline were very believable. I was equally enthralled by the politics that went on aboard the ship as well as the special effects. On the special effects side, they were done with careful precision, although they do seem dated when compared to the computer generated mish-mash of today (i.e., Matrix, Jurassic Park, etc.). I first saw ESV back in Junior High and fell in love with it. I would count this made-for-television movie as one of the inspirations for me to take up engineering in college several years later. I believe we will climb towards the stars someday, just as the crew of ESV did in the movie. I have no doubt.