The movie’s upbeat attitude and Buckaroo’s unflappable kindness and compassion are attributes that have contributed to the film’s staying power. He promptly stops the show in order to help. Buckaroo’s empathy and kindness are so attuned that he can sense when one person in a roomful of excited concert-goers isn’t having a good time. That’s one of Buckaroo Banzai’s many charms it’s continually blossoming with new and ever-stranger developments and ideas.Īlong the way, we meet the emotionally fragile Penny Priddy, who is so distraught that she attempts suicide during a Hong Kong Cavaliers rock show. Whorfin wants to use the overthruster to free his army of baddies from the 8th dimension, so he can destroy the Black Lectroids and secure total galactic domination.Īll of that delightful goofiness apparently wasn’t enough for screenwriter and Banzai mastermind Rauch, so he also added a subplot tying together the Lectroid’s invasion of earth in 1938, in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, and Orson Welles’s infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast. have perfected the overthruster, he puts a plan in action to steal it, with the help of his followers through their front organization, Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems. When Lizardo/Whorfin learns that Banzai & Co. The evil Lord Whorfin is a Red Lectroid from Planet 10, and he and his followers were imprisoned within the 8th dimension when a group of revolutionaries, the Black Lectroids, overthrew Whorfin’s totalitarian regime. Lizardo’s body was invaded by a creature known as Lord John Whorfin. Emilio Lizardo, briefly glimpsed the 8th dimension when an early oscillation overthruster test went awry. In possibly the wackiest trigger to a flashback in movie history, we learn that in 1938, Dr. The technology was refined at the Banzai Institute, with the help of Buckaroo’s mentor and late father’s colleague, Dr. Buckaroo and friends unintentionally start a galactic and interdimensional incident when our hero briefly crosses into the 8th dimension via the oscillation overthruster. It perfectly sets the tone for what’s to follow.īrilliant neurosurgeon Buckaroo Banzai, bored with the lack of challenges that his medical career was providing, began studying martial arts and particle physics with the help of his cadre of collaborators, who also all perform together as a rock group: Buckaroo Banzai and The Hong Kong Cavaliers. This one works though, because, like the movie itself, it’s crammed with so much outlandish information. An exposition dump via text like this one can often times feel like a lazy attempt by a studio to explain things to an audience it doesn’t trust to be smart enough to figure things out on their own. In the opening minutes of the picture, we learn, through introductory paragraphs of text, that Buckaroo Banzai was born of an American mother and a Japanese father – there’s even an amusing joke in the text about his heritage predicting a key attribute about the adventurer’s life: he was born going two directions at once. The title alone makes one’s imagination run wild! There are now multiple generations of fans lamenting that we’ll most likely never see the sequel that was teased at the end of the movie, Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League. But the wacky sci-fi yarn built a strong cult following on home video. The movie made only a little over six million dollars against its 17-million-dollar budget. Released in the late summer of 1984, Buckaroo Banzai was a financial disaster. During the movie, we see both a comic book based on Buckaroo’s exploits, as well as an arcade video game where you, too, can play as Buckaroo Banzai. You get the sense as you watch it that there are many untold tales revolving around Buckaroo, the brain surgeon/scientist/rock star, on the scale of something like the MCU or Star Wars. As a result, the film is crammed with meticulous detail that gives the world of Buckaroo a lived-in feel. In the interview, Richter talks at length about how Rauch constructed a whole Buckaroo Banzai universe in his head over the period of a decade, before writing the script that would become the movie. (Everybody ended up walking away from the project because of the legal issues, which ultimately killed it.) The interview was, in part, a way for Richter to get on the record during a legal battle between himself and Rauch against MGM, which was planning a television series reboot of Buckaroo with director Kevin Smith, without Richter or Rauch’s permission. Richter gave a lot of the credit for the success of his long-standing cult favorite The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension! to screenwriter Earl Mac Rauch’s unusually long gestation period on the project. In an interview from a few years ago, director W.D.
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