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Buckaroo Banzai
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Buckaroo Banzai is the lead character, played by Peter Weller, of the eponymous 1984 cult film, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.A renaissance man, the character is a top neurosurgeon, particle physicist, race car driver, rock star and comic book hero, and probably the last hope of the human race. Popular culture scholar Nevin Martell wrote that Banzai "is an anti-hero of sorts, tromping over time and space not as a buffed-up superhero, but as a smarty-pants scientist/surgeon/musician—a quasi-mythical character who resists strict characterizations. (As one character in the film remarks, "He thinks he's Einstein, James Bond and Batman all rolled into one!")."
In the film, his latest experiments open the door to the 8th dimension and unwittingly start an interplanetary battle for the world.
Biography
Born in London in 1950, the son of two scientists: Masado Banzai, a brilliant Japanese research physicist whose work in theoretical quantum mechanics is reported to have "rattled" Albert Einstein, and Sandra Willoughby, the daughter of the eccentric Scottish-born Texas mathematician Edward McKay Willoughby. Sandra Willoughby fell in love with Masado Banzai when she was sixteen and married him twelve years later, after becoming an expert in her own right in the field of negative mass propulsion. The couple fled Japan at the outbreak of World War II and eventually settled in Texas. Their son grew up in Colorado and Arizona and was named "Buckaroo" because of his father's love for the American West.In 1946 Masado Banzai and Sandra Willoughby joined forces with Masado's old friend and colleague, Professor Toichi Hikita, who shared their belief that one day man would be able to pass unharmed through solid matter. Their researches culminated in 1955 in the Texas desert, when Dr. Banzai took the controls of a jet car equipped with an early version of the Oscillation Overthruster. But the experiment ended tragically: Buckaroo Banzai's parents were killed in an explosion (caused by sabotage planned by criminal mastermind Hanoi Xan) as the five-year-old child looked on. Hikita raised young Buckaroo, using the entire world as his classroom, and the boy grew up to be, among other things, an extraordinarily skilled neurosurgeon.
Dissatisfied with a life devoted exclusively to medicine, Buckaroo Banzai perfected a wide range of skills. He designed and drove high-powered automobiles. He studied bujutsu and particle physics. His skill with a sixgun was reputed to eclipse that of Wyatt Earp. He spoke a dozen languages and wrote songs in all of them. His band, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, was one of the most popular, hard-rocking bar bands in east New Jersey (Buckaroo plays electric guitar and pocket trumpet), though its members (bearing names like Rawhide, Reno, the Swede, Perfect Tommy, Big Norse, and Pecos) were not professional musicians at all, but rather cartographers and botanists, linguists and propellant engineers, an entomologist and an epidemiologist. All of them are experts in their fields of endeavor, which is why they were drawn to Buckaroo.
Played by the actor
Filmography of Buckaroo Banzai (1 films)
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, 1h43Directed by W. D. Richter
Origin USA
Genres Science fiction, Comedy, Action, Adventure, Romance, Comic science fiction
Themes Comedy science fiction films
Actors Peter Weller, Ellen Barkin, John Lithgow, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Lloyd, Ronald Lacey
Rating61%
Banzai (Peter Weller) prepares to test his Jet Car, a modified Ford F-350 pickup truck powered by a jet engine and capable of exceeding the speed of sound. The car is also equipped with a secret device called an "oscillation overthruster", which Banzai and his associates hope will allow it to drive through solid matter. The test is a success: Banzai stuns onlookers by driving the Jet Car directly through a mountain. Emerging on the other side, Banzai finds that an alien organism has attached itself to the undercarriage.