That's when it happened.
That's when THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI: ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION was originally released (limited - it would go wide - at least, as wide as it got, on the 15th).
I'd say that's the day that changed my life; that's the day I became a fan, but that's not right.
In a lot of ways, I'd become a fan some years earlier when I discovered Doc Savage (first via the Ron Ely film, then the Golden Press hard back reprints and finally the Bantam books reprints) in grade school.
Doc Savage was a physical and mental marvel, the perfect pulp hero of the 1930s, and a character who quickly influenced a few other heroes you may have heard of. Fortress of Solitude? Doc had it before Superman. (His first name was also 'Clark' and he was The Man of Bronze before anyone ever heard of a Man of Steel.) An independently wealthy man who was both a perfect physical specimen and an expert in many mental disciplines who used his fantastic gadgets and vehicles to fight crime? All Bruce Wayne did was add a bat suit to the mix.
Doc also had a crew of adventurers helping him in his quest. Five men, each experts in their own fields of study, who traveled the globe with him, righting wrongs and punishing evildoers.
So yes, by the time THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI (or TABB as it's affectionately known to fans) came out, I was ready for it.
Some seriously random musings on my history with Dr. Banzai follows. It's long and a bit rambly but there are some cool websites at the very end if you want to skip down to those.
I don't know exactly where I first heard of TABB. I want to say there was a one or two-line blurb in an issue of Jim Steranko's PREVUE magazine, but I can't swear to it. Surely, the first detailed info came from STARLOG magazine, which ran many positive articles about the film.
A hero who was an expert in many subjects? Check. Chiefly a surgeon? Check. Close-knit team of compatriots, all with their own expertise? Check. Larger than life, out of this world adventure? Check and double-check.
Of course, TABB added its own spin to things. While Buckaroo wasn't the physical marvel Doc was, Doc Savage never had a chart-topping rock band, or comic books dedicated to him, so things balanced out.
Safe to say, the whole idea of what they were doing appealed to me, right down to admitting that Dr. Banzai was a real person and that TABB was more accurately a docu-drama than a regular movie. Hey, I was a Spinal Tap fan, I could hang with that idea very well.
And then there was the cast list:
- Peter Weller, from a great little movie called OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN
- John Lithgow from THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP and TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE
- Ellen Barkin from EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS
- Christopher Lloyd from TAXI and STAR TREK III.
- Jeff Goldblum from INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS
- Robert Ito from QUINCY M.E. (and an episode of THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN)
- Yakov Smirnoff, the Russian comedian who popped up on NIGHT COURT a few times
- Vincent Schiavelli, a great character actor from all sorts of things.
But I didn't see the movie when it came out.
My dad was in the Air Force, and the month before the film opened, we moved to Germany.
Now sure, I could've gone to see it over there when it showed up, but not knowing much of the language, the idea seemed pretty daunting.
So, I read the STARLOGs, got the comic adaption, snagged the View-Master reels somehow, had a friend in the States pick up the 'novelization' by Earl Mac Rauch - which continues the "Buckaroo is real and this is just one of his adventures" by including flashbacks and footnotes referencing other stories - and managed to get on the mailing list for the World Watch One newsletters.
The site my dad was stationed at was small - not even an Air Force base, but a few buildings on a German military base. The 'rec center' was a small building with a TV room, a paperback library, and a 'movie theater', which consisted of sixty seats, two 16 millimeter projectors, and a canvas screen stretched on a frame.
The movies came in from and AF Morale, Recreation and Welfare department once a week and were free to watch. Some of the Air Force guys volunteered to run the projectors at night for $5 a piece, and when they wanted to do something else, they'd give us kids the money and let us run things. During the summer, we worked a summer hire program that included showing noon movies, where we'd just pick one of the five or seven films we had and run it. (We ran DUNE for a solid week because it was over two hours long and kept us from stuff like painting parking lot lines.)
Roughly a year after its release in the States, TABB showed up in the shipment of movies from MWR. I was ecstatic. That weekend I convinced (not that it was difficult) whoever was showing the Friday and Saturday night movies to let me take over, because on those nights we did a late movie of whichever film we wanted. TABB was scheduled to run sometime during the week but I wasn't going to wait. I ran it as the late movie both nights, then managed to run it as the noon movie a time or two, also. By the end of the week, most of the other AF dependent kids who lived in our small community had our own Blue Blaze Irregular nicknames, which really confused and torqued off the GIs who looked at the foosball challenge ladder and wondered who the heck 'ArcLight' and 'Tigger' were.
The VHS came out and made it to us eventually and we watched it about as much as we watched MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL. And once I came back to the States I bought my own copy. When I became aware of laserdiscs and found out TABB was available, I bought one of those, too.
When I bought my first PC (after reluctantly coming to the conclusion that Commodore Amigas weren't going to win the home computer war) I hit up the available online services and found more TABB content on AOL, so that's what I signed up with. Met some new fans, reconnected with some of 'old guard' from the newsletter days...it was all good. We talked about reviving the newsletters somehow, but no one seemed quite sure how to go about it. I'd joined my first online mailing list - for the TV show SHE WOLF OF LONDON - and decided maybe we could do something like that. I didn't want to start it myself because I'm an extreme introvert (probably more than a dash of social anxiety, too) but somehow I ended up going for it. After putting out some feelers and getting some feedback, it happened.
The end of January, 1996, the first 'issue' of World Watch OnLine went out. What I did was have people send in submissions to my AOL email and then just copy/pasted them into a digest format and bulk mailed them out to subscribers. Eventually, online mailing list services started up and I was able to switch to those, which was far easier than keeping a text file of addresses and having to copy/paste those addresses into the 'TO:' field and then remind AOL that I was indeed a legit mailing list and not a spammer.... (Nowadays, the digest version of the list is pretty much dead, but there's another, more traditional list that's still going.)
I tried to write a Frequently Asked Questions file, then found out another person - Sean 'Figmentfly' Murphy, was also doing one. As luck/fate/what-have-you would have it, instead of him one-upping me at my own game - something I really figured someone would do as I was learning all this as I was doing it - on the job training at the Banzai Institute - we had taken two different and totally complimentary approaches. I'd started with facts about Buckaroo, his trusted inner circle The Hong Kong Cavaliers, and world they lived in, while Sean had started with the film - the crew, the stars, the production and that end of things. Perfect companion pieces.
I cranked out a basic website using Notepad, eventually getting my own domain name - http://www.worldwatchonline.com/ (yes, the site is way out of date, I know) and bought a cheap, hand-held scanner and a Snappy video capture device to get pictures from those STARLOGS and screen grabs from the laserdisc to put online.
Met (if only virtually) more fans - I was going to name-check some and their accomplishments outside of fandom, but I can't do them all and don't want to upset a few by leaving them out, so I'll just upset all of 'em.
Other things that have happened to and around me along the way, and in no particular order -
Managed to have several nice email conversations with TABB's director, W.D. 'Rick' Richter, and talked on the phone with Pepe 'Reno' Serna.
During a conversation about my KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER website with Joe Gentile of Moonstone Books (who do Kolchak comic books), he expressed his interest in bringing Buckaroo back to the comics page. It took some work, but with a little nudging from me, Richter and Gentile (and the lawyers) got the details ironed out and the books were published.
When MGM acquired the home video rights and intended to put out a bare-bones DVD release of the film, we used the newsletter to rally fans who both let MGM know that the market was out there for a special-features packed edition and threw ourselves in to helping out to get it done. Many of the pictures of TABB merchandise on disc are of my collection.
The DVD includes "enhanced NUON features" which was briefly going to be the "next big thing" on DVD. Certainly anything would've been better than the Interactual stuff that was so popular. Only three or five DVDs ever came out with NUON features and just a few DVD players were made to play the content, so yes, I bought another DVD player just to play the extra features on the TABB disc.
The highlight (so far) of my time in this awesome fandom would have to be going to New York City in October of 2011 to attend a Kevin Smith hosted showing of TABB, with Peter Weller and John Lithgow doing a talk and Q&A afterwards. Actually meeting fellow super-fans Sean Murphy, Dan Berger, Steve Mattsson, and Hepdog was less a pleasant bonus and more the actual deciding factor that got me to spend the money for the trip. Glad I let Dan talk me in to it.
~~ TL;DR ~~
Thanks to everyone that's ever been involved with TABB. It's been a cool thirty years. Looking forward to many more with the best bunch of folks around.
Websites to consider:
Official Banzai Institute Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Banzai-Institute/119214478147645
Official (if out of date) Banzai Institute website:
http://www.banzai-institute.com/
The woefully out-of-date World Watch OnLine:
http://www.worldwatchonline.com/
Current Buckaroo Banzai Mailing List at Yahoo:
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/BuckarooBanzai/info
Figmentfly's FAQ:
http://www.figmentfly.com/bb/bbindex.shtml
TABB at Steve Lee's Hollywood Lost and Found:
http://hollywoodlostandfound.net/features/banzai/
Ernest Cline's AGAINST THE WORLD CRIME LEAGUE script:
http://www.ernestcline.com/blog/2011/06/29/buckaroo-banzai-against-the-world-crime-league/
Moonstone Books Buckaroo Banzai page:
http://moonstonebooks.com/shop/category.aspx?catid=26
STARLOG magazines in PDF format for download:
https://archive.org/details/starlogmagazine
(issues 81, 82, 86, 87 and 88 are the main TABB related ones)
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