AG Monday!
No matter where you go, there you are.
Kind of an homage to pulp heroes, kind of deliberate camp, and definitely one of the most 80s-ish movies you’ll ever see. It’s The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension! It has been about 40 years since we saw this movie for the first time, and we’re still trying to figure out what it was supposed to be, and how we feel about it. OK, so the title character is a brain surgeon, a physicist, a rock star, a test pilot, and a comic book hero….? OK, cool.
Join us as we re-visit this movie, with a great cast who may or may not have known what this film was supposed to be.
Super-science! Space Rastafarians! Orson Welles! Shock treatments for fun! John Lithgow having a great time! An unnecessarily long movie title! Very 80s fashion! It’s all here.
Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of culture. We were geeks before it was chic!
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I’ve heard of this movie before, but not enough to tell what it was even about. For some reason there were references to it in the Trek message boards in the 90s.
Having heard the podcast about it, I don’t think I learned what it’s about 🙂
Anyway:
Q: Can Eloi be eaten with fingers?
A: The discriminating Morlock should know it’s good manners to eat Eloi fingers separately.
On the offhand mention of the Get Smart! movie, The Nude Bomb, there was another one made for TV movie made in 1989 called Get Smart, Again!
I loved that show*, and saw the movies. I recall little of all of them, but that I thought them uproariously funny. I should try and rewatch them and see if my memory is accurate or not (probably not).
One joke I recall from the latter movie is during a fight scene at either a library or a book warehouse. One of the bad guys tries to stab Max, and he blocks the knife with a thick book. He then says “Nobody gets through War and Peace!” the title of the book he used.
I still think it’s funny.
*It showed almost nonstop on reruns through the mid 70s.
@Kathy: I was a fan of the show. My memory of the “Nude Bomb” was that it was pretty bad. I think I saw the second one as well, but don’t have much of a memory of it.
@Kathy: If you have ever heard and/or know anything about the Doc Savage pulp series, it is very reminiscent, and perhaps a satire of Doc Savage.
It’s the first film I ever saw John Lithgow in. It is highbrow satire – there is no mugging to let you know it’s satire, which you might not understand at first. But yes, there are moments.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I think I might have recorded the latter movie, and seen it again a few times. I went hunting for the synopsis online, and almost all came back while reading it.
BTW, John de Lancie was in it.
@Jay L. Gischer:
They mentioned Doc Savage in the podcast. I don’t think I’d ever heard of him before. Maybe an offhand reference or two when reading about old (20s-30s) SF magazines, which feature prominently in Asimov’s memoirs.
@Kathy: I had an uncle who read a lot of Doc Savage and when he finished them, he passed them on to me. It was fun stuff. Not quite superhero stuff. Not quite sci-fi either. But very fun.
@Jay L. Gischer:
I guess superheroes did not emerge fully grown and armed from the head of Stan Lee 😀
Returning to the week’s topic, the podcast suggested a sequel or three, or a TV series based on the Buckaroo Banzai universe, might have done better at storytelling and characterization. I realized a great many TV shows kind of move things, characters, tropes, and such around until they find a format that works.
This struck me while watching Trek, starting with TOS. Early on, for example, Spock states flatly he has no emotions. Later he claims to tightly controls them (with slips, such as the wide smile that accompanies the utterance “Jim!” at the end of Amok Time). Starfleet isn’t mentioned until well into the first season. The Enterprise and other ships of her kind are referred to as Earth ships. The TOS Klingons later would embarrass Lt. Worf. Things like that.
So, in essence a movie needs to get it mostly right the first time. Even then, things will change with sequels (see Star Wars, for one). this would explain the never ending sequels and formulaic film-making.
Oh, and a new Kathy’s First Law: Movies with a cult following rarely do as well as break even at the box office.
God, I loved this movie. I dragged friends to see it, who didn’t get it. I dragged girlfriends to see it, with mixed results. I LOVE this movie. It was the first film I’d ever seen that really took comic book storytelling seriously and transferred it to film without Disneyfication. Weller was good; Lithgow was awesome; Goldblum (whom I’d never seen before) was perfect. So very many memorable one-liners. (“Laugh while you can, monkey boy.”)
Delighted to hear you reacting to this. Can’t wait to hear the whole episode.