Most of the main cast members from the first film returned for the sequel, including Candy Clark, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Cindy Williams, Mackenzie Phillips, Charles Martin Smith, Bo Hopkins, and Harrison Ford.

One character burns his draft card, showing a younger audience what so many Americans had done on the television news ten years before the film's release.

After the success of Star Wars, Universal City Studios president Sid Sheinberg felt that American Graffiti could have a sequel.

Lucas considered Robert Zemeckis, who had finished directing his first feature film I Wanna Hold Your Hand, but he turned down the offer.

A fictional band named Electric Haze featuring Doug Sahm appears in the film, most notably performing the Bo Diddley song "I'm a Man".

"[8] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two out of four stars and called it "one long confusing movie" that is "really too ambitious for its own good.

"[10] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times was also positive, writing that "the protagonists are affecting as before and More American Graffiti is an uncommonly evocative trip back to our common past‍— a stirring reminder in both style and substance of what we've been through.

"[11] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote "All this fussy, arbitrary switching of scenes, years and aspect ratios may wow them back in film school, but the complicated framework reveals nothing but one inconsequential or misleading vignette after another.

Norton doesn't achieve a true dramatic convergence of parallel stories; and his historical vision is confined to cheerleading reaffirmations of all the old counterculture cliches about war, cops, Women's Liberation, you name it.

"[12] Veronica Geng of The New Yorker called the film "a mess of time shifts and pointless, confusing split-screen techniques that make the images look dinky instead of multiplying their impact.

"[14] George Lucas reflected on the experience in 1997 during the production of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, remarking to Frank Oz: "You just never know on these things.

He argued that its commercial failure was all but certain given its box office competition on opening weekend (Apocalypse Now and Monty Python's Life of Brian), and that it suffered by association with most sequels at the time being perceived as financially motivated since they were not part of studios' business models yet.

"More American Graffiti is an experimental love-letter to teenage omnipotence becoming adult mortality", centered around Milner's death and the characters in the later storylines processing it.