Some pro-fun video clips for a Monday:
Sep. 22nd, 2014 10:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
capri0mniPrompted by a question from someone in my circle, who asked what's good to watch when you need cheering up, it only took a moment's thought to come up with Buckaroo Banzai (came out the summer of 1984 -- this is its 30th anniversary! \o/ Woot!). Which, sadly, I haven't actually watched in ages. So I did a YouTube hunt, and found the trailer.
Turns out, I'd never actually seen the trailer (Mother suggested we go see the movie based on a newspaper ad). Note to Hollywood promotional people: This is the right way to make a trailer -- it totally conveys the tone, it's catchy and sticks in your head, introduces the faces of all the characters, and it teases the action without spoiling any of it.
Buckaroo Banzai: Proving bowties are cool before Matt Smith outgrew his high chair.
(A bit of a O_o realization for me, right this moment: Mother was the age I am now when she and I saw this movie together, just the two of us. We went back twice more in the same week: once to watch it again with a family friend, and again to go back and watch it with my father. We bought the vhs when it came out /and/ the novelization from Pocket Books... oh, and we also 3/4 of a litter of kittens born a few weeks later after major characters).
(oops. I promised clips, plural. here's a favorite scene):
(unfortunately, I can't find the clip I want, where Buckaroo and his alien companion sneak into an enemy transport vehicle, and the alien says: "It's like one of our thermopods. But it's a very bad design." This is a line that pops into my head whenever I come up against Accessibility!Fail...)
Why TF is Robocop more famous than this?! (don't tell me -- I know: the hero is more complex than a gun-shooting robot, and it's a comedy / sci-fi flick, before geeks were recognized as a cash cow audience).
[ETA: a Buckaroo Banzai Q & A with Peter Weller and John Lithgow, from 2011: http://youtu.be/N8R8wmlggwc (43 minutes). Watching these two remember how much fun they had making the movie is almost as much fun as watching the movie itself.]
Turns out, I'd never actually seen the trailer (Mother suggested we go see the movie based on a newspaper ad). Note to Hollywood promotional people: This is the right way to make a trailer -- it totally conveys the tone, it's catchy and sticks in your head, introduces the faces of all the characters, and it teases the action without spoiling any of it.
Buckaroo Banzai: Proving bowties are cool before Matt Smith outgrew his high chair.
(A bit of a O_o realization for me, right this moment: Mother was the age I am now when she and I saw this movie together, just the two of us. We went back twice more in the same week: once to watch it again with a family friend, and again to go back and watch it with my father. We bought the vhs when it came out /and/ the novelization from Pocket Books... oh, and we also 3/4 of a litter of kittens born a few weeks later after major characters).
(oops. I promised clips, plural. here's a favorite scene):
(unfortunately, I can't find the clip I want, where Buckaroo and his alien companion sneak into an enemy transport vehicle, and the alien says: "It's like one of our thermopods. But it's a very bad design." This is a line that pops into my head whenever I come up against Accessibility!Fail...)
Why TF is Robocop more famous than this?! (don't tell me -- I know: the hero is more complex than a gun-shooting robot, and it's a comedy / sci-fi flick, before geeks were recognized as a cash cow audience).
[ETA: a Buckaroo Banzai Q & A with Peter Weller and John Lithgow, from 2011: http://youtu.be/N8R8wmlggwc (43 minutes). Watching these two remember how much fun they had making the movie is almost as much fun as watching the movie itself.]
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Date: 2014-09-22 03:57 pm (UTC)I never really clicked with the movie when I saw it; maybe I was the wrong age (possibly I've always been the wrong age - I wasn't that far out of my high chair myself when it first came out, so I don't have the cultural background), but it's a fun movie and it has some of my favourite actors in it.
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Date: 2014-09-22 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-22 04:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-22 06:51 pm (UTC)That's why it's such a great trailer. That's pretty much what it is. I can't decide which pairing I ship harder, Buckaroo/Rawhide, Buckaroo/Perfect Tommy, or for a Mentor/Daddy 'ship, Buckaroo/Akida.
Except it's the MOST FUN massive Action, Drama, Comedy, Romance, Political Satire, Rock-and-Roll Backstage Drama, and Comic Book- sci-fi film ever.
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Date: 2014-09-22 06:07 pm (UTC)One of the best DVD releases too (in the US at least) with commentary and informational subtitles treating the movie as a dramatisation of the real life Team Banzai and evolving the mythology along with the novelisation which adds even more bits and pieces.
My favourite bit of the movie? "What's that watermelon doing under there?"
* - The others being Big Trouble In Little China (the director of Buckaroo Banzai was one of the writers), Ghostbusters, The Blues Brothers and The Italian Job.
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Date: 2014-09-22 06:52 pm (UTC)XD
[ETA: According to that interview I posted in my ETA yesterday, W. D. Richter actually helped write Buckaroo when he and Earl Mac Rauch were in college together; somewhere in a YouTube comment, I read that he basically made used Big Trouble to tell the story of Buckaroo Banzai and The World Crime League.] *amused, wistful, smile*
no subject
Date: 2014-09-23 01:50 am (UTC)