could someone explain the appeal of Buckaroo Bonzai? I’ve seen it twice and I wasn’t impressed.
It helps if you have a dry, warped sense of humor.
Character is what you are in the dark.
Or possibly who. I’m more of a Barbarellaafficionado myself.
Great movie. Terribly edited.
I’m still waiting for Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League. Although I have seen Big Trouble in Little China, so maybe that’s close enough.
There was a pretty good fan-written script for World Crime League available on the net awhile back…whoever wrote it did their research; they used material from the novelization of the first movie, and even included a cameo by Jack Burton and his Porkchop Express…it was removed from online due to legal threats from the copyright holders, I believe.
“Not my damn planet, Monkey Boy!”
pretty much explains its appeal to me.
The ST:TNG people behind the scenes were big fans, too. All sorts of little in jokes cue you in to this.
I once saw a guy in a Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems t-shirt. Oooo, I was jealous.
Didn’t the plaque on the bridge say “Wherever you go, there you are”?
My mom hated it, because she said it didn’t make any sense.
I loved it because it makes PERFECT sense, but the plot is so complicated and moves so fast that you have to understand every single line, and it took me several viewings before I figured out what was going on.
And also because of all those great lines, thrown off as if they were nothing.
It was a pretty good movie but not deserving the “classic” label IMO. I saw it once right after it came out and that’s enough.
Haj
It’s an attempt consciously make a cult film, which means it’s too cute for its own good. It’s just mediocre with a little bit of watered weirdness (and I get weirder things for free in my breakfast cereal).
I know this sounds like a cop-out, but if someone has to explain BB to you you’re probably not going to get it. It’s been my experience that BB is not and can’t be an acquired taste. One either hates, loves or is indifferent to it upon first viewing and one’s opinion of it doesn’t change upon repeated exposure. Me, I love it.
I’ve seen it several times because it’s a favorite of my bother’s. It works too hard at being a quirky cult movie. It falls flat much of the time as a result.
I heard that the reason it seems so badly edited is that initially it was scripted and filmed as a comedy, then they tried to change it over to a straight sci-fi action adventure by cutting out all the punch lines. No cite or anything, but I read it on the internet, so it must be true! 
Ditto what Otto said. Either you like it or you don’t. If you do like it, repeated viewings just make it better (you catch more of the throw away lines and strange details), if you don’t like it repeated viewings will make it seem more and more strained and stupid (and dated).
I think the reason that it was so badly edited is that it was fairly low budget and seemed to have lost its support from the studio.
I remember a year or so before it was released (yes, I’m dating myself) there was a large ad campaign complete with trailers in theaters and Peter Weller on the talk show circuit. Then nothing. I thought I had imagined the whole thing. Then when it was released over a year later it wasn’t plugged at all. Perhaps it didn’t go over well with pre-view audiences, who knows.
(three guesses as to whether or not I’m a fan)
I remember a convention panel just after the movie was released which featured some of the people involved with the movie. They had some comments on the lack of support the movie had. (It was at an Atlanta Fantasy Fair if anyone cares.)
Apparently the studio in question had several movies they were releasing that summer. The studio (at the time) thought that BB would be their big release but they had a strange way of marketing it. They planned to hold it back and release their weaker movies first. According to them, theatres would sign agreements to show movies for a certain number of weeks and, if a movie turned out to not be successful, the theatre would negotiate with the studio for a “replacement” movie to fill out the length of the agreement.
For whatever reason, they were planning on using Buckaroo Banzai as the replacement movie. Apparently they thought that the movie was weird enough that theatres wouldn’t sign up to show it and by doing it this way they would get wider distribution than they would have otherwise.
Well, what happened is that one of their “weaker” movies became a surprise hit. (I think it was Weird Science but don’t quote me on it.) At any rate, two things happened. The theatres didn’t request a replacement movie (so they never got BB offered to them) and the marketing/advertising money they had planned for BB got reallocated to their surprise hit. Buckaroo Banzai itself wound up getting pushed to later in the summer as theatres extended their runs of the other movies.
That was the story as they told it. At the time they still had some hope that the sequel would get made but obviously that never happened.
Thanks for the insight tan, that actually clears up why the marketing and release of the movie seemed so odd to me. And it reassures me that my memory of the events isn’t completely warped (which is always a possibility).
A friend of mine has a roll of those Hello, My Name Is stickers, only these have the Yoyodyne logo on them, and printed on the large blank white area is the name JOHN. So the whole roll goes:
Hello, My Name Is JOHN
Hello, My Name Is JOHN
Hello, My Name Is JOHN
It just gets funnier the further you go down. 