You know what would make a great half hour family sitcom? Taking the Cantina scene from “Star Wars” and extending it, said no one ever. Recently unearthed on the web after years in virtual obscurity, “Starstruck” is the clear cut result of the massive popularity of “Star Wars,” revealing how a studio attempted to market on the fame with a very low budget sitcom format. Chronicling the adventures of the McCallister family, we follow their long lineage through the opening credits and watch as their descendants are now exercising good old fashioned capitalism in the galaxy.
The McCallisters are a large clan of space explorers that run their own Hotel and Restaurant, and come across all kinds of wacky misadventures and goofy alien species. You’d think a show like this would lack the wide scope it requires, and you’d be right. Most of the pilot is filmed in doors like a situation comedy, with only brief establishing shots of the McCallister space station. Granted, while the monster effects are terrible, the miniature work is pretty solid most times. While it’s somewhat similar to “The Jetsons” in small instances, the influences are clearly derived from “Star Wars.”
The creators even feature two very sassy droids, one of whom is gold, while the other is small and white. The small and white droid sounds like a Scottish au pair, for some reason, doting over the kids in the series. It’s not at all hard to figure out why “Star Struck” never landed as a television series, mainly because it’s so utterly and painfully unfunny. It’s bad enough the series is so derivative it borders on copyright infringement, but a lot of the humor is based around “It’s funny because it’s space!” The father of the McCallister Clan spends his breakfast trying to crack open an alien egg to eat because it’s space. The grandfather of the clan wants a specific type of cereal with an odd name because, it’s space.
One of our supporting characters Max orders a peculiar drink from a bar that spews purple smoke because, you know, it’s space. So it’s funny. All in all, “Star Struck” is a very unbalanced result of the “Star Wars” mayhem that ensued after the movie released in 1977. The pilot attempts to mix sitcom comedy, family comedy, musical numbers, and science fiction action unsuccessfully, resulting in what is a late seventies oddity worth watching mainly for hardcore “Star Wars” fanatics and pop culture buffs.