As a longtime film fan who is entering “the September of my years,” I’ve come to realize there are some movie-related moments which I’ll never get to experience. Odds are I’ll never watch the lost Lon Chaney silent shocker London After Midnight. There’s no chance now I’ll see a Star Wars sequel scene where Luke, Leia, and Han are reunited (thanks a lot, Disney). And it’s looking more and more like I’ll never go to a theatre for a matinee of “Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League,” whose forthcoming release I was promised way back in 1984, but has yet to materialize.
Cult films are a funny thing. Sometimes a movie gains a devoted following because it’s a classic (Casablanca), or because it’s classically bad (The Room), or because it was overlooked upon first release and is rediscovered by later generations of fans (The Rocky Horror Picture Show). This last example is the best way to explain the appeal of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension, a wild mix of science fiction, comedy, action, and rock ‘n’ roll that is marking its 40th anniversary this year.
The movie’s origins trace back to when author Earl Mac Rauch began crafting loosely connected stories about a daredevil jack-of-all-trades originally named Buckaroo Bandy. Befriended by fellow Dartmouth alum and Hollywood screenwriter W.D. Richter (Slither, 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers), Mac Rauch shared his tales and was asked by Richter to develop a screenplay featuring the character. Well, he came up with several unfinished ones–changing the hero’s surname to Banazi along the way–before a treatment entitled “Lepers from Mars” was used by Richter and production partner Neil Canton to land a development deal with M-G-M/UA chief David Begelman.
After a couple of years in production limbo and a studio change to 20th Century-Fox, the revamped The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (I’ll henceforth leave the subtitle off if it’s okay with you) was released in August of 1984 with Peter Weller in the title role. Lost amid a season of summer blockbusters–Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and Ghostbusters, among others–the relatively star-free (Jeff Goldblum and John Lithgow were arguably the biggest names) saga suffered from Fox’s relative lack of promotion and only made back about half of its $12 million cost. It wasn’t until several years later–after the film’s home video release–that the small number of fans (myself among them) from its failed theatrical run were joined by passionate re-watchers and new devotees of its wackadoo sensibility.
Playing like Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (whose closing also announced a sequel that was never made) on magic mushrooms, the story follows neurosurgeon/physicist/explorer/rock star Buckaroo and his elite team of fellow adventurers/bandmates, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, as they face an invasion of Earth by evil Red Lectroids from Planet 10 by way of the 8th Dimension. The dimensional barrier, which Buckaroo inadvertently broke during a test run of his experimental jet car, had previously been breached in 1938 New Jersey by scientist Dr. Emilio Lizardo (Lithgow, heartily hamming it up with the best Italian accent this side of Chico Marx). The resultant rift allowed Red Lectroid ruler Lord John Whorfin to enter his mind and drove Lizardo mad.
Meanhile, a rival alien faction, the non-belligerent Black Lectroids(who sound like and disguise themselves as Rastafarians), charges Banzai and his crew with stopping Whorfin and aide John Bigbooté (Christopher Lloyd), or else they will be forced to initiate World War III between the U.S. and Soviet Union in order to eliminate the transdimensional threat. On top of that, Banzai meets a mysterious girl named Penny Priddy (Ellen Barkin) who is the spitting image of his late wife and who is kidnapped by Lizardo, desperate for the device Buckaroo invented that will allow him to “go home.” And that’s just for starters.
A contemporary reviewer said that watching The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai felt akin to coming in the middle of an ongoing film series and missing out on a lot of running jokes, which is to some degree the feeling that Richter and Mac Rauch were going for. Nothing illustrates this better than the scene where, during a search of Buckaroo’s HQ, New Jersey (Goldblum) and Reno (Pepe Serna) pass a mechanism with a melon in it. “Why is there a watermelon there?,” asks New Jersey, to which Reno simply says “I’ll tell you later.” He never does, of course (Richter later explained it was a joke placed in the shot to see if nitpicking studio execs were still paying attention). It’s this sensibility that made some watchers feel lost, while those of us raised on comics books and similar geek fare appreciated it. I mean, how can you not like a film where one of the Black Lectroids informs his superiors that a colleague was killed by saying “John Valuk is dead. He fell on his head” (and yes, all the aliens have the first name John)?
A quick shout-out must be made to the casting for the film. As I said, in 1984 the only “star” players were Lithgow (who had been nominated for Best Supporting Actor Oscars the previous two years for The World According to Garp and Terms of Endearment), Goldblum (hot off 1983’s The Big Chill), and perhaps Lloyd, best known at the time for TV’s Taxi. Both Weller and Barkin would, of course, go on to bigger things. But peppered throughout Buckaroo are familiar character actors (Clancy Brown, Rosalind Cash, Dan Hedaya, Robert Ito, and MovieFanFare favorite Vincent Schiavelli) and some faces you wouldn’t expect (Russian-born comic Yakov Smirnoff as a U.S. National Securtity advisor?).
In an era when “geek culture” seems to dominate Hollywood and comic book movies still hold sway over the box office, is the time right for some studio to consider a Buckaroo Banzai reboot or maybe make the long-promised World Crime League follow-up (Mac Rauch penned a novel version of the story in 2021)? It’s a tricky question, since trying to capture cult film lightning in a bottle twice can be a very problematic proposition (Shock Treatment, anyone?). I, for one, think it’s best at this point to just let the 1984 original rest on its own singular merits. However, if some enterprising filmmaker does decide to go there, just remember what Buckaroo himself said: “No matter where you go…there you are.”