Pop culture
Noel: Gentlemen, I know that like myself, you’re both big comics nerds, so you’ll probably remember that stretch of the mid-to-late 1990s when Kurt Busiek, Mark Waid, Warren Ellis, and Alan Moore were all writing books so dense with references to other comics, movies, TV shows, and real-world cultural figures that some websites started publishing guides to what everything was pointing to. Well, The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension was playing the dense-pop-culture-reference game a decade before any of those comics. Some of the references in Buckaroo Banzai are explicit, such as the connection between the evil Lectroids and Orson Welles’ War Of The Worlds broadcast. Some are slyer but still clear, such as the font on The Hong Kong Cavaliers’ tour bus, which is modeled after the cover of Elvis Costello And The Attractions’ 1980 album Get Happy!!. Some are more general, such as the similarities between the multitalented Buckaroo and the classic pulp hero Doc Savage. One of the biggest nods in the film is the name of its villains’ fake company, Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems, which is stolen from Thomas Pynchon (who himself was referencing pop culture liberally as early as the 1960s). My favorite of the more general pop-culture references is how the Hong Kong Cavaliers’ adventures are recounted in a popular comic book, just like in the classic Stan Lee/Jack Kirby run of The Fantastic Four.
Is this kind of multi-genre mash-up and winkfest just about shameless geek appeal? Or is there more to Buckaroo Banzai’s blend of comics, rock ’n’ roll, science fiction, and Universal monster movies than meets the eye?
Matt: The hidden references floating just below the surface are a lot of fun to find; they also mirror the plot of the movie, in which an invisible alien invasion is going on beneath humanity’s nose, and it’s up to Buckaroo Banzai and his team to uncover this secret plot that’s been hiding in plain sight all along. In both cases, attentive viewership is the key.
Speaking of the aliens hiding in plain sight, these bad guys are surprisingly similar to the ones in John Carpenter’s They Live, which was released four years after Buckaroo, in 1988. Was there just something in the air in the 1980s that sparked a lot of paranoid science fiction about aliens lurking among us? Or was this actually a reference to a future movie, which is somehow explainable using eighth-dimensional mathematics?
Noel: Or maybe, like Welles’ War Of The Worlds, Buckaroo Banzai is secretly a documentary, and They Live is too!
Keith: I think the detail of Buckaroo’s adventures happening in the real world while also being recounted in a comic book is a particularly nice touch. It’s a nod to Fantastic Four, as you noted, but it also taps into how the film works—for those for whom it does work, anyway. Watching the movie feels a bit like picking up an issue of a comic with an enormous backstory and an apparently infinite future. Who is Buckaroo? Where does he come from? Why does he do what he does? The film gives viewers the bare details, then expects us to catch up on our own time.
Anyone not into that could be left swimming. But the references to other works provide a bit of footing. If you know H.P. Lovecraft, you’ll see a bit of his mythos in the Lectroids. And if you don’t get that reference, then there’s surely something you’ll recognize. And, fittingly, the film has become its own reference point. Which is a long of way of answering your question. A shorter way would be that its rich tapestry of references is a lot of fun, and integral to its appeal.
The cast
Matt: The theatrical cut of Buckaroo Banzai runs just 103 minutes, which isn’t much time to establish or pay off a cast as large as this one; 16 characters show up for the closing credits’ curtain call/music video/collection of people randomly walking in an L.A. aqueduct for no reason whatsoever, and that doesn’t even include the ranks of the evil Red Lectroids. With such a huge assortment of heroes and villains, casting is hugely important; credit to casting director Terry Liebling for assembling a truly great group of actors to sell this massive fantasy. Frankly, I don’t know if there’s ever been a better assemblage of eccentric character actors as the one she put together to form the core of the Red Lectroid menace: Vincent Schiavelli, Dan Hedaya, John Lithgow as Dr. Emilio Lizardo, and of course, Christopher Lloyd as John Bigbooté (that’s Big-boo-TAY!). One of those guys could fill any movie’s weirdness quotient; Buckaroo Banzai has all four of them.
Keith: It’s like a magnet for cult stars, isn’t it? Past and future: Not only does the film feature all the people you mention, but it also has appearances from future Wiseguy and Breaking Bad MVP Jonathan Banks as a hospital guard, and Carl Lumbly—later of Alias and the voice of the Martian Manhunter for the animated Justice League series—as the Lectroid ally John Parker. Here’s my question: Did it sometimes feel like too much to you? Is putting Jeff Goldblum and Peter Weller together too much wry charm for one film? Is there room for Christopher Lloyd and John Lithgow on the same team? (Well, another question might be: Is there room for anyone and John Lithgow on the same team when Lithgow goes this big?) Me, I like it. It feels like too much, but as part of a movie that makes “too much” into an aesthetic choice. I’m not sure this cast would work together anywhere else, but I’m glad it came together here.
Noel: Too much? Never! The whole ethos of Buckaroo Banzai is one of excess: premises upon premises upon premises. Besides, without Jeff Goldblum in the movie, we wouldn’t get to hear the highly Goldblum-y response to whether he can sing: “A little. I can dance.” But with all these fine character actors jostling for position (and we didn’t even mention Ellen Barkin, or Clancy Brown, or… Billy Vera?), let’s not discount the bold move of making Weller the hero. A handsome guy with an oddball energy, Weller looks like he should be a movie star, but if it hadn’t been for films like this one and Robocop, I don’t know that Hollywood would’ve ever figured out what to do with his aloof cool. Weller holds this movie together by playing the material straight, but with just a bit of a twinkle.
Matt: In general, I’m with Noel: The casting works. In a movie about the hunt for an “oscillation overthruster,” you need a little reckless excess. With the specific example of Lithgow and Lloyd together, it works because it establishes these Red Lectroids as a truly (and consistently) bizarre race. They don’t just seem like aliens; they seem like aliens from the same messed-up planet where everyone’s insane. It gives Buckaroo Banzai’s universe an extra jolt of reality.
Noel: True story: Watching the movie again, I didn’t recognize Jonathan Banks at all until I heard him talk, at which point my wife and I both shouted, “It’s Mike!”
Saved by home video
Keith: I don’t think we’ve yet noted that Buckaroo Banzai didn’t perform particularly well when released in theaters. At all. It arrived at the end of a summer that brought Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, Gremlins, Star Trek III, and Ghostbusters, so in theory at least, audiences should have been primed for its oddball genre charms. (Ghostbusters in particular seems like a spiritual companion, though parts of Buckaroo Banzai arguably out-deadpan even Bill Murray.) Yet flock, audiences did not, maybe in part because the film puzzled most critics. That meant we never got to see Buckaroo take on the World Crime League in the sequel promised over the closing credits.
But Buckaroo Banzai plays in every scene less like a film to be enjoyed by the masses than one meant to be passed around like a shared secret. And that’s more or less what happened, as Buckaroo Banzai moved from theaters to video stores and found a more receptive, geekier audience, ready to quote its lines. Such is how cults were made in the 1980s. If it weren’t for VHS tapes and word of mouth, we might not be talking about this movie now. Even films like Re-Animator, a low-budget film that made money in theaters, only blossomed into phenomena thanks to video stores. So, taking Buckaroo out of the equation, what are your favorite saved-by-home-video films? And is there a contemporary equivalent of the phenomenon?
Noel: I’m going to go with another film with a W.D. Richter connection, the Richter-penned Big Trouble In Little China, which similarly makes a hash of a bunch of different genres, from kung-fu to monster movies to the typical 1980s “lunkhead hero” flick. I don’t want to overpraise this era, because a lot the cheese that came out of the factory back then was of the bland, processed variety. (Also, the soundtracks sucked, by and large.) But a lot of clever genre movies slipped through the system somehow, perhaps because they had that VHS safety net.
Is there a contemporary equivalent? I’d be tempted to point to the SyFy Originals, but those try so hard to mimic those old, crazy VHS finds that it isn’t a fair comparison, really.
Matt: I wouldn’t put it in the same (world crime) league as Buckaroo Banzai, but Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim definitely has a similar vibe. Both are original properties heavily based on old movies, comics, and cartoons. Both center on a motley team of characters (or stereotypes, depending on your mood) fighting off an almost-insurmountable alien invasion. Both are American films steeped in Japanese culture. Both get a real kick out of nerd heroes who use their brains to save the day. (Come to think of it, both movies are literally brainy. Buckaroo is a neurosurgeon, and Charlie Day’s Dr. Newton Geiszler puts his own noggin into the head of a dead kaiju to try to understand their plans for world domination.) I wasn’t crazy about Pacific Rim, but all the things I liked about it—its inspired designs, intricate mythology, the wacky character names—bear a distinct Buckaroo Banzai influence.
Mythology
Matt: Unlike the vast majority of modern superhero movies, Buckaroo Banzai decidedly isn’t an origin story. When the story begins, Buckaroo Banzai is already a world-famous neurosurgeon/rock star/hero, with his trusty sidekicks The Hong Kong Cavaliers and his legions of assistants from The Radar Rangers and The Blue Blaze Irregulars. Beyond some basic details about his parents (most of which were cut from the film’s theatrical release), we’re given almost no information on Buckaroo or the Cavaliers’ history. This isn’t his first adventure, or even his greatest adventure, but simply his current one. Richter’s technique is typified by the scene where Jeff Goldblum’s New Jersey, the newest Cavalier, turns to Pepe Serna’s Reno Nevada, a Cavalier veteran, as they’re walking through the Banzai Institute and asks, “What’s that watermelon doing there?” The response: “I’ll tell you later.”
But he never tells New Jersey (or us) later. The watermelon, like so many quirky details, remains a mystery, its story saved for another time and another film. The effect is not unlike starting with issue #365 of a long-running comic book. Do you guys like this unusual approach? Or would you have preferred a more traditional origin story?
Keith: I think that watermelon moment is the movie in miniature: Viewers embrace the mystery or are frustrated by it. It’s what separates Buckaroo fans from everyone else. And it’s part of why I liked watching this movie more the second time. I missed it in 1984, and somehow never caught up with it until about a decade ago. And then I wasn’t sure what I’d seen. It felt like an in-joke with no punchline, though I thought the problem might have been with me. This time, I just kind of went with it, and enjoyed myself a lot more, knowing confusion was part of the pleasure of the movie. It’s a world big enough to get lost in, so long as you’re okay with feeling a little lost.
Noel: Me, I won’t even pretend not to love all that stuff. I love how the good Lectroids speak with Jamaican accents, while the bad Lectroids, having spent 50 years in New Jersey, are now tubby working-class schlubs who can’t spell. (“Nobudy Cumz In Here. Sekrit.”) I love the president’s bad back, and that one of his national-security advisors is played by Yakov Smirnoff (and is named “Smirnoff”). I love that the Hong Kong Cavalier named “Pecos” isn’t on this mission because he (or she) is in Tibet, for some unexplained reason. All of this, as I know from reading up on Banzai-iana, is partly the result of the movie’s long development process, during which Earl Mac Rauch wrote several discarded scripts from which he drew a lot of this mythology. It all reminds me a little bit of Kurt Busiek’s comic Astro City, in which Busiek assumes that any reader who knows anything about comics will be able to keep up with all of his nods to stories that he’s never actually written. If you love the world where Buckaroo Banzai comes from, it’s easier to love Buckaroo Banzai.
Matt: Rauch and Richter are so into the mythology of Buckaroo Banzai that they even extended it to the movie’s DVD commentary; on it, they act as if Buckaroo is a real guy that they’re making a film about. In other words, they treat Across The 8th Dimension as a biopic, not a work of science fiction. So they compare the Jetcar onscreen to the one that Buckaroo “actually” built, or how Peter Weller looks to how the “real” Buckaroo Banzai looks. Rauch goes even further by recording his portion of the commentary in character as the “real” Reno Nevada of the Hong Kong Cavaliers. (He says the real Buckaroo’s eyes are very different than Weller’s.) I’m not sure this approach is more entertaining than a straightforward commentary track (it’s certainly less informative), but I admire their commitment to maintaining the integrity of the crazy world they’ve built.
Final thoughts
Noel: Guys, it’d be easy to fill out the rest of this discussion with Buckaroo Banzai quotes, but since we already have a whole essay about that, how about a round of appreciation for some of our other favorite bits of Banzai, like the peppy little synthesizer theme that plays at the end, while the heroes all walk together. There’s no movie that can’t be improved by a closing shot of people walking in unison to music.
Keith: No movie? I’m not sure about that. But a movie like this? Absolutely. It feels like a victory lap from all involved, and even if Buckaroo Banzai had to wait years for the love it deserved, it got it eventually. Besides, time is just the fourth dimension. Buckaroo deals in (at least) eight.
Our Movie Of The Week Forum began yesterday with the Keynote essay on Buckaroo Banzai’s quintessential quotability, and continues tomorrow with a look at the secret code of VHS cult movies.