This is what I bought a blu-ray player for: the ability to relive great movie memories in the highest possible quality. So it was with no small sense of enthusiastic nostalgia that I ran out to buy the new blu-ray edition of Nick Castle's The Last Starfighter. This unassuming 1984 space adventure (which is equal parts sweet, funny, exciting, and family-friendly) showed up in the summer of Gremlins and Ghostbusters, and while it certainly wasn't a FLOP, it's safe to say that The Last Starfighter should have done a little better than its $29 million domestic haul. (I remember seeing it on a double feature with Richard Franklin's Cloak & Dagger. Fun night!!)

But solid movies (particularly solid sci-fi movies) tend to stick around for a good long while, and this fan favorite has been earning new friends over its 20+ years of cable re-runs and home video releases. (In case you haven't seen it, The Last Starfighter is about a bored but decent young man who has a gift for video games ... and quickly finds himself stuck in an interstellar battle between good and evil.) As with many mid-'80s space adventures, TLS adopts a rather "Spielbergian" tone, but also manages to tap into a cinematic innocence that predates E.T. by a few decades. I thought I loved this flick when I was a kid, but after more than two decades since I last saw it, I can now say the "grown-up" me likes Starfighter even more than the kid did.

Plus the blu offers two really strong retrospective featurettes (one from 1999 and the other brand new), an image gallery, a pair of trailers, an audio commentary with director Nick Castle and genius production designer Ron Cobb, and some "D-Box" features I'm afraid to mess with. It's a win-win for movie geek parents, too: You can introduce your kids to a sweet sci-fi adventure that still holds up really well, and after the tots hit the sack you can dig through the supplemental goodies and learn how popular, influential, and well-made the flick actually is.

And yes, some of the CGI work might look kitschy to our modern eyes, but if you can't appreciate the early steps in CGI made by Tron, Young Sherlock Holmes, and (absolutely) The Last Starfighter, well ... you probably should.