The current fervor of nostalgia for 1980s entertainment appears to be expanding to encompass even relatively obscure media from that era, including a recently announced follow-up to a sci-fi film I’m betting most of you haven’t seen.

And by “obscure,” I mean even more obscure than Netflix’s already-announced prequel series to Jim Henson and Brian Froud’s 1982 fantasy epic “The Dark Crystal,” because on July 14, news broke that 1984’s “The Last Starfighter” will receive a sequel.

For a film that never even came close to setting any box office records, “The Last Starfighter” is still fondly remembered by a certain subset of nerds because it aspired to deliver the same sort of wish-fulfillment thrills as Ernest Cline’s debut novel “Ready Player One.”

Indeed, more than a few fans have pointed out that Cline’s second novel “Armada” borrows more than a bit from the plot of “The Last Starfighter,” which could make things interesting if the “Starfighter” sequel and the no-doubt-inevitable movie adaptation of “Armada” go head-to-head in theaters, but I digress.

If you’re not an Eighties nerd like me, all you want to know is this:

Is “The Last Starfighter” worth watching?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before; a gifted, good-hearted kid who’s stuck in a boring, cloistered community has ambitious aspirations for his future, but he has no realistic way to make those dreams a reality, until a sketchy would-be mentor offers him an opportunity on a literally cosmic scale.

This is all lifted directly from Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey,” but the clever conceit behind “The Last Starfighter” is that the arcade game that trailer park teenager Alex Rogan (Lance Guest) plays so obsessively is secretly a recruiting tool for an actual interstellar war, in which the Rylan Star League really is defending “the Frontier” from Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada, just like in the video game.

When Alex breaks the record for the game’s high score, he’s contacted by a man named Centauri (played by an older Robert Preston, still in full-on Harold Hill “Music Man” mode), who whisks him away to the planet Rylos and attempts to recruit him into being an actual Starfighter.

As seen in 1999’s affectionate “Star Trek” parody “Galaxy Quest,” every fandom nerd’s secret fantasy is to find out that their favorite fictions are actually real, and “The Last Starfighter” gets a lot of mileage out of the wide-eyed Alex finding out that everything he’s already familiar with from the video game is true to life.

This film was made only two years after Disney’s “Tron” in 1982, and both films were among the earliest to make heavy use of computer-generated imagery in their action scenes.

While this makes “The Last Starfighter” a fascinating archaeological artifact in CGI history, it also leaves a number of the film’s key … well... star-fights feeling a touch truncated by modern standards, even though the filmmakers were clearly testing the limits of the technology that existed at the time.

“The Last Starfighter” distinguishes itself from the countless other “Star Wars” knockoffs that were released in the same decade by giving us a cast of characters we could invest in emotionally.

Lance Guest is appealingly earnest as Alex, conveying his inner conflict over his aspirations and his responsibilities, and Catherine Mary Stewart (who also starred in “Night of the Comet” in 1984) is fittingly fetching as his loyal but less-ambitious girlfriend Maggie.

Although the prosthetic makeup design for the Rylans is disappointingly dull, all the other aliens sport distinctive visuals, including Dan O’Herlihy — in a break from playing villains in the “Halloween” and “Robocop” films — who’s made unrecognizable in lizard-like latex as Alex’s absurdly optimistic spaceship co-pilot Grig.

In the range of 1980s sci-fi films, “The Last Starfighter” is a solidly okay three-chord song, but with writer Gary Whitta, who co-developed the story for “Star Wars: Rogue One,” posting on Twitter that he’s working on a sequel with Jonathan Betuel, the writer and creator of the original “Starfighter,” it’s worth checking out the source material, if only to see what they might come up with.