The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension: The 80s Cult Classic I Didn’t Know I Needed In My Life
My husband and I recently watched The Adventures of Buckarro Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. It’s a movie that has been on our Movie Watch List for quite some time but I don’t think I would have ever gotten around to watching it had my husband not put his foot down and said, we’re watching this movie tonight. My husband added the movie to our watch list based on it being referenced in Ready Player One. I had never heard of it and looking at the title alone, I didn’t expect to be interested in it at all.
But it wasn’t until it came up in a recent conversation on The Palmer Files, that it finally moved to the top of the list. We found it available streaming free on Youtube with ads, which was perfectly fine for us. We put our little one to bed, grabbed some desert and settled down to watch the movie.
I’m not sure what I was expecting when the movie started, maybe some strange homage to a spaghetti western or a comedy spoof akin to Blazing Saddles. I definitely was not expecting an 80s Sci-Fi adventure/comedy touting a veritable cast of well known actors who went on to play iconic roles within only a few years of this movie that I had never heard of.
You have Peter Weller in the title role of Buckaroo Banzai, he goes on to become Robo Cop. One of your villains is played by John Lithgow of Footloose and 3rd Rock from the Sun. Coming off of her breakout in Diner and then Eddie and the Cruisers in the two years leading up to this film, Ellen Barkin is your female lead. Then sprinkle in a supporting cast featuring everyone’s favorite chaos theory mathematician Jeff Goldblum, everyone’s favorite Delorian-driving scientist Christopher Lloyd, Clancy Brown who a couple years after would find out there can only be one, character actors Vincent Schiavelli and Dan Hedaya and just some guy named Carl Lumbly. Just kidding, THE CARL LUMBLY of Cagney & Lacey AND M.A.N.T.I.S. AND Alias. Although, being the big DC fangirl that I am, I know him as the voice of the Martian Manhunter in the DC Animated Universe and the father of the Martian Manhunter in CW’s Supergirl.
For the most part this movie was not the springboard for many of these actors, in fact this movie was a box office failure, making back less than half its production costs. It was released by 20th Century Fox in August of 1984 coming up against big competition in the likes of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Ghostbusters. The movie didn’t stand a chance, panned by critics for having a confusing and overly complicated plot and just being strange. And that’s just the ticket, the perfect recipe for a beloved cult classic, which is exactly what it becomes once it makes it to home video and finds a lovely audience of geeks ready to sing its praises.
Directed by W.D Richter and written by Earl Mac Rauch, the movie focuses on Dr. Buckaroo Banzai, the definition of a polymath with the professions of physicist, neurosurgeon, test pilot and rock star, who is going to save the world from inter-dimensional aliens from Planet 10. He discovers these aliens while traversing the 8th dimension in his jet car designed to pass through solid matter with the help of an “oscillation overthruster” which he is testing. However, Buckaroo isn’t going to save Earth all on his own, no no, he has help from his gun-toting band The Hong Kong Cavaliers, with names like Perfect Tommy, Reno Nevada, Rawhide and New Jersey and an extended network of “civilians” recruited to assist them when needed called the Blue Blaze Irregulars.
I am not going to spoil the full plot, which I know seems silly for a movie that is over 40 years old. But honestly, even if I did give the full thing away, I think most people would think I was making it up. This movie is bonkers and outlandish in the best ways possible. The music is fantastic, the wardrobe is quintessentially 80s while also being utterly unique to this cast of characters.
This movie has some of the funniest and silliest names for characters that I have ever seen, and yes most of them are the aliens, but it’s not because they sound like alien names that make them chuckle worthy, for example John Whorfin and John Bigbooté. From the moment the intro started and gave us the background of who Buckaroo is and what he does, I knew I was going to love this movie. During one of the coolest end credit sequences I had seen in a long time, I was craving more and for it to keep going. When it was over, I thanked my husband for forcing us to sit down and watch it together.
The very end of the movie also promotes a potential sequel with a title card reading The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League. This made me very excited and started me down a Buckaro Banzai rabbit hole that led to this very post. A sequel was sadly never made but a film novelization, comic book and video game were all released in conjunction with the movie in 1984. The book, like the end of the movie, also teased future novels but unlike the movie, a sequel to the original book was written and released in 2021. Both novels were written by the movie’s writer Earl Mac Rauch.
Nothing further has graced the cinema or TV screens related to Buckaroo Banzi. Fox was going to develop a TV series in the late 90s but it never released except for a computer-animated test reel that wound up on the special edition DVD. In May of 2016, an announcement was made of a Kevin Smith adaptation for television, but by November of the same year that was also no more. However, the movie lives on regardless, in the many references to it made in other TV shows and movies, notably the office of YoyoDyne Propulsion Systems on the promenade of Star Trek’s Deep Space Nine and being Parzival’s favorite movie in Ready Player One.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I am off to go watch the movie again and I highly recommend you go watch it too. In the words of Buckaroo, it’s important to remember that “No matter where you go, there you are.” So be there on the sofa with some popcorn and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzi Across the 8th Dimension.