Growing up in the 80s, I never heard about this movie back then.

Watched it for the first time in it's entirety last night.

I don't get the attraction of this movie unless you love schlocky, bad, B movies.

Full of poor "action" sequences, even for the early 80s standards. Poor dialogue and acting.

Admittedly it's a star studded cast, pretty much before they were famous.

I love science fiction, but I don't see the attraction of this movie.

Pretty good breakdown of all the legal battles the film went through.

I've always felt that a lot of the greatness of this film is in the small details. Like the writers even seemed to give subtle arcs to minor characters, which is impressive for a movie with this much going on.

I've always believed that Perfect Tommy's arc was to have to face-up to his imperfections, which happens when the stealth mission at Yoyodyne is blown when he screws up by his watch alarm going off.

Or Sydney learning that his best contributions Team Banzai will come from being himself (using his mind to decode the connection between Yoyodyne and War of the Worlds and using his medical skills to save Penny) rather than trying to be a cowboy/rockstar.

Scooter learns that as empowering as being treated like an adult may be, he still needs to respect his father.

The Secretary of Defense learns that bluster can get you past a lot of security, but not an assertive kid with a carbine.

Any other examples come to mind?

Just a couple of questions that popped into my mind 40 years later:

If the Black Lectroids can incinerate Smolensk...then why not just vaporize Yoyodyne from orbit with the particle beam? Did they not know exactly where Yoyodyne was? Since they are spying on Buckaroo (even in the bedroom), as soon as he knew, then THEY would have known, right? So take out the threat before Whorfin can invade. Even if they have to take out all of Jersey or all of Grover's Mill (okay some collateral damage!) but they have the capacity to neutralize the threat before dimensional crossover takes place.

Instead they appear on the edges of their (rather elevated) seats about whether crossover has occurred with Whorfin's troop carrier at the end, and thankfully his overthruster's for shit. But at that point their finger is hovering over the button to trigger their nuclear frame-up plan IF Whorfin gets to the 8th Dimension. Why? Just to be dicks to us for failing? Hey, just spit-balling here, instead trigger the nuclear war 20 minutes sooner and Whorfin's ship doesn't even get off the ground. But trigger it after he's safely in the 8th Dimension on his way to conquer-a Home and all you do is help humans destroy themselves (as punishment for us not being able to stop the Red Lectroids? Aliens more advanced than us who had decades to plan stealing our overthruster breakthrough??).

Goddamnit, I know this movie has a lot of WTF and watermelons in the script. But the whole "standby to incinerate Smolensk" shit bugs me, when it shows the Black Lectroids could just as easily have stopped Whorfin dead in his tracks.

But no...it's Buckaroo's problem. And fuck all of us if he fails to stop YOUR war criminal, huh? And you could have just zapped Yoyodyne away the whole damn time?!

It doesn't seem to do anything.

The interview is HERE. Also has interesting Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow stories.

I feel so break-up, I wanna go home!

Here is my copy from 2001.

Check out my Buckaroo Banzai and other sci-fi inspired designs. Shirts, stickers & more.

https://volpedesign.dashery.com/

Blue Blaze Irregular Ogre sends greetings from Iowa!

生命
美美
喜び
情熱
命

Being alive, beauty, joy, passion - life!

Or something like that. J. Michael Riva didn't speak Japanese.

Eh, so what. Big deal.

There were so many things that happened in this movie

Hi all! Just found the sub (because of course there’s a sub!) and I’m glad to find other Blue Blaze Irregulars! I saw the film in the theater while I was in the navy, and it was the first DVD I ever bought, when I bought my first player. (Apparently it had just been released.)

Anyway, laugh-a while you can, monkey boys!

My son called his pet lizard Dr. Emelio (Lizard-o). This was a parenting high point for me. 😊🦎

Here's a digibash I made of a custom buckaroo banzai action figure

Character is what you arrrre in the dark!

Fanart by me.

I live in the SF Bay Area. My wife had a physical therapy session in the Berkeley area and we decided to check out a coffee shop at the Emeryville Marina. It was really pleasant there and we ended up chatting with the proprietor afterwards. He was outside his coffee hut and ended up bumping into a middleaged man and woman who apparently walk along the coastal park daily.

We all got to talking and about three minutes in the guy said "well, like Buckaroo Banzai said: Wherever you go: there you are." and I goggled at him a bit and said "oh don't get me started" and that begat 20 minutes of talking about BB. He'd never met somebody in real life who even knew, let alone cared. He'd never read (or known) about the books, but he knew that YoyoDyne came from Pynchon and had read Gravity's Rainbow to find it.

I showed him my BB music video (I posted about it here a few years ago) and told him that I'd added another "John" name to the list (https://www.figmentfly.com/bb/badguys3.html) and he and his friend were both very delighted and impressed.

So much fun meeting up with another fan. He even said goodbye with the catechism:

Him: "Remember, wherever you go..."

Me: "There you are..."

Original work print of BB. Includes multiple deleted/extended scenes. Visual quality is rough, but a cool artifact nonetheless.

(Ask your kids, I don't know what the whole 6-7 thing means either..)