20 Things You Didn’t Know About Galaxy Quest
Did you guys ever WATCH the film?!
20 years on, affectionate Star Trek parody Galaxy Quest is now considered a blistering comedy in its own right - but the film’s genre credentials are rated even higher.
The story of a motley crew of washed up actors catapulted into an interstellar incident after being mistaken for the characters they played on a cancelled sci-fi show, Galaxy Quest was a critical hit at the time, if only a modest financial success. However, over the intervening two decades it’s had longer legs than half the movies it sends up.
That's partly because Galaxy Quest isn't just a send-up of Trek, or even of medium budget science fiction TV in general - it's also a dedicated love letter to fandom, released at a time when being a geek wasn't the hip thing it is today, and before social media helped the MCU made geeks out of millions of ordinary people worldwide.
So here, twenty things that only a serious Questhead would know. As always, this is a movie trivia article, so you should assume you’ll find spoilers within...
20. The Original Idea… Wasn’t All That Original
Mark Johnson, the film’s producer, loved the central premise of David Howard’s original script… just not the script itself. That’s why he passed it on to Bob Gordon for a rewrite, giving us the movie we know and love today.
The thing is, Howard’s premise isn’t exactly an original take: it’s the basis for 1987’s The Three Amigos, a Magnificent Seven spoof which sees three Hollywood actors famous for playing western heroes, mistaken for actual western heroes by the frightened denizens of a threatened village.
Not only that, but persistent rumour has it that there’s actually an old piece of Star Trek fan fiction which sees the cast of the original series beamed aboard a spacecraft whose inhabitants believe their show is real...