And when I say "younger viewers," I mean younger viewers in 1988, not today, who have a shorter attention span and need more special effects. In fact, today's kids would find the 1988 vintage PC-generated computer graphics on the control screens laughably primitive. (Which they were even by the standards of the day. Most late '80s videogames had much better graphics.) Because of the low budget, the show is almost completely shipbound, except for a few scenes on Earth early on and a fight on Expo Tomorrow halfway through, which doesn't fool anyone with its clearly soundstage atmosphere. The Voyager sets are a variety of vacuformed plastic panels assembled into various compartments, including the lounge, the gym, the corridors and the airlock. Yet the interior did feel somewhat well-designed and -realized as a ship. There are a few space shots, mostly two or three repeated ad infinitum, with the same cheesy music playing. But you can't expect a megabucks blockbuster from a family-oriented pilot produced for the Sunday Disney movie. This was one of the early efforts at reducing production costs by filming in Vancouver, a practice since adopted by many TV shows and movies.The movie was part "Star Trek," part "Lost in Space," part "Space Academy" and part "SpaceCamp" I actually enjoyed this much more than the early episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" broadcast in the months preceding this, which were so serious and self- important. Bienstock was a dead ringer for Will Robinson, redheaded kid super-genius (with a dollop of Wesley Crusher added). In fact, this is actually much more enjoyable than the 1998 "Lost in Space" movie, which had the splashy effects but not the fun. The cast was generally fine, if a little stiff at times, even veteran Duncan Regehr, whose head-thrashing electrocution spasms in the climax were hilariously amateurish. Pity the show was never picked up, so the young actors never had time to hone their craft.Alas, aside from the relatively stock plot (including the transparent ruse at the end), the writer really played fast and loose, betraying a poor understanding of science. Here they are, just starting out their mission, and they almost immediately find the Vanguard Explorer. How could the Vanguard Explorer find Demeter with its probes so quickly when it was so close to Earth? (They weren't out there that long since much of the crew including Vance was still young.) They also catch up to a whole passel of radio transmissions from Earth, ranging from Lindbergh's flight to stuff from the '80s. But seeing as how the speed of light (and radio waves) can't vary, there's no way all those signals could all be in the same spot for them to be received simultaneously. In fact, even the newest signals they intercepted, Oliver North's Iran-Contra testimony, should have been 100 light years from Earth (100 years old at the time, traveling away at the speed of light). They were taking 12 years just to get the 18 light years to Demeter, so catching up to signals that should have been up to 160 light years out at the beginning of the mission is supremely silly.It looks like the show would have had Admiral Beasley chasing them all the way. But since the Triton Corsair was faster than Earth Star Voyager, why did they need Voyager? And transporting billions of humans almost 20 light years to another planet? How long would the trip have taken? With that much life support needed for 6+ billion humans on a 12-year trip, couldn't they just have cleaned the Earth? Was the hitherto rare Baumann Drive that easy to manufacture that they could build them by the millions? That has to be one of the silliest "science fiction" ideas I've ever heard. They would have been better off spending their resources building O'Neill space colonies, especially since they had to build the giant Voyager just to transport a small crew.Do you want to feel old? Imagine first watching this movie where they say it will be a 26-year mission. Feels like a very long time in the future, right? Guess what? If it were real, we'd be closing in on the end of the mission today, after 19 years. Time flies.

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.