Say it with me, folks! Never give up, never surrender! Galaxy Quest star Tim Allen recently met with Entertainment Weekly to offer an update on the long-gestating sequel to the beloved 1999 sci-fi comedy, and what he had to say was rather promising.
It's to be understood that Galaxy Quest fans have wanted a sequel to the beloved film for quite some time, though at a point when things were looking good, Alan Rickman, who played the ornery Shakespearian-trained Alexander Dane (a.k.a. Dr. Lazarus) in the film, passed away in 2016. Sadly, Rickman's untimely passing threw a wrench into the gears of plans for a sequel due to the script very much focusing on the friendship of Rickman's Dane and Allen's Jason Nesmith (a.k.a. Commander Quincy Taggart).
"It's a fabulous script," Allen revealed to EW, "but it had a hiccup because the wonderful Alan Rickman passed. So it all got very sad and dark because [the script] was all about [Lazrus] and Taggart. It was all about their story. It doesn't mean they can't reboot the idea, and the underlying story was hysterical and fun."
"I haven't reached out to anybody in the last week, but we talk about it all the time," Allen elaborated. "There is constantly a little flicker of a butane torch that we could reboot it with. Without giving too much away, a member of Alan's Galaxy Quest family could step in and the idea would still work."
Eager to share more details with the outlet as well as fans, Allen let it slip that the draft script includes plot elements involving light-speed space travel time dilation, with the NSEA Protector crew being out-of-sync with the rest of the planet.
"[The sequel] could happen now or in five years and it doesn't matter at all because when you travel at light speed when you come back it can be like only 20 minutes, but 20 years have passed, right?" Allen says. "That part is wonderful for the sci-fi freak in me. But right now it's in a holding pattern."
While we could still be light-years away from a proper sequel to Galaxy Quest, it's been said that enough deleted scenes exist to perhaps craft an extended cut of the original film. Apparently, some of Rickman's scenes were deemed too risque for studio executives, despite the film's director, Dean Parisot (Bill & Ted Face the Music), wanting to leave them in.
Are you still down for a Galaxy Quest sequel? Would you happily purchase an extended cut of the original film, if it were to be released? I sure as hell would. By Grabthar's hammer, what a concept!