joeartguy:

Michael Boddecker – Buckaroo Banzai End Credits

Speaking of the 1980s weirdness I miss, here’s one of the slickest end credits sequences ever, from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984). I was listening to this on tape 30 years ago, despite the fact that there has never been an official soundtrack to this movie. I am listening to a version on my iPod tonight.

I loved how cheap interesting summer movies were cranked out in the 80s. To use my target year, 1984: people have pretty much forgotten that (in today’s dollars) films like Top Secret!, The Terminator, and The Karate Kid cost less than $20m to make. Beverly Hills Cop and Buckaroo Banzai were middle-of-the-road films, budgeted at just under $35m. Big budget special-effects films like The NeverEnding Story and Ghostbusters came in under $70m.

Yes, those are all in today’s dollars — Ghostbusters cost $30m to make in 1983 bucks, Terminator $6.4m. As a result, a lot more films were made, and more experimental stuff was tried and released. If you could make a film for $4.2m (a whopping $9m in today’s dollars), then what the hell, go ahead and make Red Dawn or Night of the Comet. As much as I love today’s Marvel films, you could use part of the catering budget of one of them to make Repo Man.

I can’t help but think there’s just too much money being dumped into films today, turning potential moderate successes into borderline-to-guaranteed losers. The original RoboCop (1987) cost $13m ($28m) to make and brought in $55m ($117m). The remake this year cost $130m — more than four times as much, and more than the original made in its theatrical run. I’m kind of amazed that the new one still turned a profit. R.I.P.D., with the same budget, didn’t, and that film is actually fun to watch.

There was no soundtrack to Buckaroo Banzai because the whole property was in some kind of crazy legal morass — in part, according to the moviemakers, because of the involvement of producer/embezzler David Begelman. Hollywood, right?

Ask me how much I love the Buckaroo Banzai end credits.

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