revisiting ‘Buckaroo Banzai’
Didja ever sit down to watch one of your favorite movies only to suddenly realize -- as it begins and you get into it and get reminded how much you goddamn love this movie -- that it’s probably been like 10 years since you watched it? Cuz, you know, our very favorite movies are always with us, always close, like your favorite people, even if you’re not actually with them and sometimes let weeks or months or longer go by without giving them a call? It’s not like you mean to let a year slip away before you drop an email to a pal on the other side of the country, or a decade go by without watching a movie you watched a hundred times as a teenager. It just happens.
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And I surely must have watched The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension a hundred times in the mid 80s. I was constantly borrowing it from the library. That’s right, kids: no one owned VHSes back in the day. I mean, not people, unless you were rich: they cost like a hundred bucks; they weren’t like the cheap DVDs you get in your Christmas stocking or your Easter basket, almost like an afterthought. The public library owned VHS tapes, or Blockbuster did, and you had to just keep borrowing them over and over again if you were a nerd like me.
So this is one of those movies I have memorized, not just the script and not just the quotable lines, the “Laugh while you can, monkeyboy”s and such. Nope: I can’t help but mouth along with all the dialogue, and I can’t help but anticipate, like, the lens flare when Dr. Lizardo shorts out the Buckaroo Banzai video game when he’s escaping from the mental hospital. (I told you I was a nerd for this movie.) And so when I popped my DVD in to watch it again last night and suddenly started seeing stuff I’d never seen before, it occured to me that even though I’ve owned this DVD for years, I cannot have ever watched it. Which means I’d never seen the movie in widescreen before (that’s right, kiddies: VHSes were pan-and-scan). Which explains how all this stuff on the edges of the screen were new to me.
I had no idea, therefore, that Pinky Carruthers is on horseback when he’s doing guard duty at the gate of the Banzai Institute. I had never seen the Rug Suckers or whatever they’re called, the backup Blue Blazers Perfect Tommy calls in for the raid on Yoyodyne... and I’m not sure of their actual name because previously they had been a mere throwaway that Buckaroo mentioned in passing in a line that’s a bit garbled... but here they are, off on the far right side of the screen, with a truck with a logo on it and everything. Amazing!
And the clarity of DVD! How can I never have noticed that sign in the background before, the one announcing that the Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems plant is a “top secret facility”? Hilarious!
Banzai never fails to amuse me, what with its “Declaration of War: The Short Form” and Buckaroo’s “Remember, no matter where you go, there you are” and Buckaroo himself, who was a geek -- a neurosurgeon and a particle physicist and a rock star and a comic book hero! -- who was tres cool before it was cool for geeks to be cool. But now I feel like I have some new Buckaroo stuff to explore. Which is good, because if we’re never gonna get the promised sequel, Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League, at least it’s something.
(Technorati tags: Buckaroo Banzai)
comments
posted by Joseph (March 21, 2008 11:42 AM)
Ok, I officially need to see this movie. Off to the old NetFlix queue.
posted by PaulW (March 21, 2008 12:50 PM)
Only shame of this movie: they killed off Clancy Brown's guy, and not Jeff Goldblum's. And he was dressed up as a cowboy?! Eighties fashion, did any of us survive that decade...?
BTW: Rumor has it the planned World Crime League script got re-worked into Big Trouble In Little China (there's a reference to a Lo Pan in Buckaroo Banzai setting him up as Buck's arch-nemesis).
posted by ariadne (March 21, 2008 3:58 PM)
I adore this movie! "No matter where you go, there you are" is one of my favorite quotes, and I still have a crush on Buckaroo. I can't count how many times I've watched it, but reading this I realized that it's been more than five years since the last time. So I know what I'm doing this weekend. Thanks for the reminder!
posted by Greg (March 24, 2008 10:30 AM)
Mary Ann, have you read Earl Mac Rauch's novelization of his own screenplay? It's not just some quickie cash-in, but rather a much richer, more complex exploration of the Buckaroo Banzai universe. Well worth tracking down, it reads like a geek-cool homage to Doc Savage, The Shadow, and a ton of other pulp greats. Reviewer Alexandra Dupont likes the
book so much, she calls the movie "a partially successful adaptation of its own novelization."
The "Big Trouble in Little China" rumor has persisted for years, mostly because Banzai director W.D. Richter reworked the Big Trouble screenplay. But really, that's the only connection. Big Trouble in Little China was originally conceived as a period western. Ricther updated it to present day. The excised villain in Banzai (who appears in the book and the comics) is Hanoi Xan, not Lo Pan.
posted by MaryAnn (March 24, 2008 4:17 PM)
I have read the novelization, and I love it.
posted by boz (March 25, 2008 9:34 AM)
while reading this I remembered. Just a while ago I rewatch Tremors in HD, lots and lots of detail I missed when I watched it in VHS was just there. Slimy worms, gunfires, freckles. There was a saying about classic literature, you have to read it again after 10 years to understand it, I guess it's same as the movies.
I wish they could do HD thing for buckaroo too.
ps: whenever I watch something in HD I notice freckles. It's odd.
posted by Clayj (March 25, 2008 1:59 PM)
ps: whenever I watch something in HD I notice freckles. It's odd.
Mimi (Alicia Coppola) on Jericho has amazing freckles in HD. Love 'em.
Buckaroo Banzai could easily receive the HD treatment... now that the Format War has ended, I'm sure it's just a matter of time before someone restores the film and releases it on Blu-ray at full 1080p.
posted by MaryAnn (March 25, 2008 2:18 PM)
David "Doctor Who" Tennant has amazing freckles, too, that are only apparent in HD.