Behind-the-Scenes with Dad, Filmmaker, and Megaforce Fan Bob Lindenmayer

A Guest Post by Bob Lindenmayer

Filmmaker/Director of D3F 2026 Official Selection "Making Megaforce"

IMAGE: Making MegaForce promotional photo provided by Bob (left) with actor Barry Bostwick (right).

EDITOR'S NOTE: Now in my 5th season scanning the indie film landscape for stories relevant to Daddying Film Festival & Forum (D3F) themes celebrating the importance of Dads and dad figures, in their presence and absence, so many films catch our daddying eye via our various social media or FilmFreeway's "Now Submitting" emails. At first synopsis glance, some don't quite seem to fit. And so it was with Bob Lindenmayer's Making MegaForce.

Making MegaForce seemed right up my RiffTrax/Mystery Science Theater 3000-loving alley: a story celebrating the obscure fandom of a campy sci-fi flick that has earned it a solid 6% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. After watching the trailer for Bob's documentary, I thought it might at least include a good "dad figure" angle. So, I decided to reach out to him on social media last July to confirm and see if he'd be interested in submitting Making Megaforce for D3F 2026 consideration.

But he beat me to the punch.

A day after the thought crossed my mind to contact Bob, this was the Instagram message I got. It made his film even more endearing to me, being a latch-key kid of divorced parents, myself:

Howdy - Your fest has me intrigued. My new film "Making MegaForce" is all about Dads, sons, daughters, and flying motorcycles…the film's subtext is about working out my abandonment issues over my Dad leaving the same summer as MegaForce came out, and chasing Ace Hunter/Barry Bostwick around as my replacement father figure.

That same day, I invited him to not only submit his film, but also to share his touching backstory as a future Daddying blog guest post. I thought it might be more convenient for him to tell it to the camera than to write it, so I left the format up to him. Bob's guest post below is a transcribed excerpt from a longer daddying testimonial video, which we've published on the D3F YouTube channel as well as at the end of today's post. It's an important, thoughtful video well worth watching in its entirety, particularly for 80s kids, like me, still trying to fill the Dad-shaped holes in their hearts.

You can see Making MegaForce and 70+ other daddying films during our 5th annual, virtual D3F starting next week, January 9-15. Get FREE passes now – Happy New Year and Daddy on! - Scott

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Hi, film festival goers. My name is Bob Lindenmayer. I'm the director of a little film called Making MegaForce. A little bit of information about me and that, I suppose. When I initially started this documentary, I was a huge fan of the original 1982 film MegaForce, probably one of only 38 people who watched it. And that was when I was about 10 or 11.

And through the advent of the internet, there's just been thousands – hundreds of thousands – of posts and videos about folks making fun of the original MegaForce. And mostly all for the right reasons. It's a movie that is open to being maybe picked on or teased a little bit because of its audacity and silliness and, some would say, campiness.

Being an original fan of the movie when I was 10, I didn't actually feel that way about the movie. I thought it was epic. Perfect in every way to a 10-year-old boy. "The good guys always win" was something that really resonated with me.

And so, I decided to make a film about kind of the other side of MegaForce and what it meant to people who really loved it. I went after trying to celebrate the film and why maybe it shouldn't be picked on as much as it is because the original director, Hal Needham, made exactly what he wanted to make.

It's a good film. It's a good tale. It's a good – I don't know if morality tale is the right word – but yeah, it's not claiming to be anything other than, "the good guys always win," and you get to see some cool stuff. And that should not be a bad thing.

When I decided to actually direct my first film, which I've never done before, I really wanted to model my film in the same way. So, it started out me just trying to do everything that the original MegaForce did, on my scale and budget, to hopefully show people what it takes to make a movie like this even if you think it's a bad film. I started that process gathering interviews – okay, I've got to get this guy, got to get this guy – and, obviously, the lead of the movie is international film star Barry Bostwick, and, obviously, I needed to get him in the film to tell the story about MegaForce and in interacting with him, amazingly, we just became very close friends. That's when my film kind of changed as far as [being] a defense of [Bostwick] being in MegaForce.

You know, I was looking at the early footage we had shot, and in every scene, you see me kind of following him around like a puppy dog. Really wanting to please him. Really wanting to show off for him. And as I started to cut the movie, I was just like, "Oh, my gosh, I'm so embarrassed."

MMF promotional photo. On set with Bob and Barry.

It really looked like I was desperate for this older male's attention. So, I just started cutting around myself being so needy for his attention. And that parlays into kind of the spirit of [the Daddying Film Festival & Forum] as far as it's really easy to say, "Dad issues," you know, which is the shorthand.

My Dad and Mom got divorced the same summer that MegaForce came out. And so, I was kind of, I don't know…I guess a good man is, yeah…it's hard to talk about. I started cutting [me out of the film] like I had some shame around that. I was trying to get rid of it in my film and when I started collaborating with my real, grown-up editor and good friend Felix Chamberlain, who also helped produce the movie, he just kept saying, "Bob, no, you have to have this part in it. We need to know Bob's story."

I knew.

I knew that was the right direction for the movie and, at the same time, personally, it was really scary to kind of be vulnerable enough to say, "OK, my Dad's gone, and for some reason I'm chasing Ace Hunter/Barry Bostwick like maybe he's a new father figure for me."

I'm still struggling with ownership of that. And the nice thing about the completed film is it really shows that, and hopefully in a loving way. It became a journey of healing some of my childhood trauma and wounds around abandonment and missing my Dad all the time.

The other thing in in making my movie – I'm a Dad now I've got two amazing kids – is that [you can see] in so much of the footage, whether I needed help with it or whether there was a cute moment with them, they started to become part of the film as well. And it became really important to me to show, in my mind, what a good Dad can be. I didn't want to make a film about failures in parenting, although there's some subtext in there around that.

IMAGE: MMF Promotional photo

I'm going on and on. I apologize. Like, it's a challenging thing to talk about for me still. But I think it's the goal of the film, and I think it's one way it's resonating with audiences. Because I was just real honest. I miss my Dad and was kind of "grasping his straws," so I chose a movie superhero from a film that nobody's ever seen to focus my attention on and search for healing around those old childhood wounds.

So I'm getting off topic again…

...I ramble on a lot, but I really appreciate the opportunity to share, and I really believe in the [Daddying Film Festival & Forum’s] conceit and what they're trying to do. I think there needs to be more attention brought to – again, I'll just speak for myself – how many guys are just kind of moving through the world needing a little bit more from their peers or needing a little bit more from a father-type figure.

Thanks for watching this if you made it through the whole thing and I hope you really enjoy my film. I hope you really enjoy the Festival. I think it's really important and so bold to really kind of put names to some of this stuff for some of us guys out there who maybe didn't get what they expected when they signed up for this life.

"Deeds not words," as they say in the "Megaverse." I hope see y'all at the Fest!

Watch Bob's entire behind-the-scenes featurette, from which this guest post was excerpted. It further details his inspiration and epic journey to creating the feature documentary, Making MegaForce, a 2026 Daddying Film Festival & Forum (D3F) Official Selection:

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Bob Lindenmayer is a filmmaker and Dad to two kids, Eleanor and Calvin. Making MegaForce is Bob's directorial debut. His resume includes over 20 years of graphic design experience creating game, web, video, and merchandising projects. He also has worked on other independent films, such as Prospect and the Life After Movies franchise, as a graphic designer and prop designer. An avid film prop collector and cult cinema enthusiast, Bob boasts the largest collection of vehicles from the 1982 film MegaForce, several of which he has meticulously restored. Beyond film, Bob enjoys competitive rally car racing with his kids. You can follow him and MMF on Instagram.