His mother in a photo snapshot and deleted scene is played by Jamie Lee Curtis, for reasons unknown. It should be noted that Peter Weller, whose ethnicity is reportedly European, plays Banzai, but the character is Asian-American. There’s even a comic book based on him – the “latest issue” of which the movie itself offers a glimpse. By the time the movie opens, Banzai is established as being one of the most famous people on Earth. Richter – is a glimpse into a couple of days in the life of Buckaroo Banzai, a late-20th century adventurer, neurosurgeon, physician, test pilot and rock star. Buckaroo Banzai opened August 10, the same day as Cloak & Dagger, a movie touting Dabney Coleman as a super spy, that had everything that Buckaroo Banzai had, plus the bonus of ticket buyers at the box office.īuckaroo Banzai –which to this day is referred to as a “docudrama” by its creators, writer Earl Mac Rauch and director W.D. All that was missing was a Bond movie.īy August, the pace of still-remembered films had slowed with releases like “Grandview USA,” The Philadelphia Experiment, Cloak & Dagger, Dreamscape, and Clint Eastwood’s Tightrope. In other words: except for the Marvel movies that were to come decades later, the summer of 1984 pretty much created our modern-day pop culture. ![]() In July, The Muppets Take Manhattan, The NeverEnding Story and Prince’s Purple Rain. In June, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the non-hit Streets of Fire, Ghostbusters, Gremlins and The Karate Kid. It’s hard now to imagine the one-after-another string of hits released those summer months: Beginning in May, Robert Redford’s The Natural and then Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I had been a reviewer for my newspaper for several years – all through college and after I got hired full-time – by the time the summer of 1984 came around. On the results page for a Google search of the film’s title, under the category “People also ask,” the first question is, “Is Buckaroo Banzai a real movie?” In hindsight, the question stands up pretty well: is it a real movie? And furthermore is it a real cult movie? An attempted cult movie? Or is Buckaroo Banzai just a memorable bomb that’s got a Rotten Tomatoes rating of about 68 percent and inexplicably lives on in the hearts and minds of some of us? River - Buckaroo Banzai is one damn weird movie. From the opening crawl trying to set up the premise of a scientist/surgeon/test car driver/rock star, to the end credits, justifiably well-remembered for the music video-like footage of the main characters jauntily parading around the concrete basin of the L.A. I reviewed it for the newspaper where I worked at the time.)Īfter a week in my small city, the movie disappeared. No one says, “Oh, I remember seeing Rocky Horror on the weekend it opened.” It’s always, “Oh, I remember going to see ‘Rocky Horror’ 27 times when I was in college.” By comparison, does anyone remember seeing Buckaroo Banzai on its opening weekend in August 1984? (Aside from me, I mean. The movie’s August 1975 release by 20th Century Fox is beside the point given its decades of life in midnight showings, complete with audiences throwing bread and squirting water guns. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is, without a doubt, a cult movie, for example. ![]() That’s very nearly the perfect definition of a cult film.īut is Buckaroo Banzai really a cult film? Or was it just a big-studio release that attempted to inspire a cult movie reception that fizzled in theaters but still, somehow, lives? That’s pretty easy to claim, since it’s a movie that didn’t connect with audiences when it was released to theaters in August 1984 but has no small measure of affection from many even now, going on four decades later. ![]() It’s been said that The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension is a cult film.
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