Following his small screen exploits in Central City with last week’s episode of The Flash, Kevin Smith has announced on his podcast Hollywood Babble-On that he’s working on a new TV series based upon the 1984 cult film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. Here’s Smith’s comments on the subject:
“Because I did the episode of The Flash, suddenly it’s signal light of, ‘oh he’ll do fucking television?’ Which is weird because I’ve been doing TV for five-six seasons – we’ve just been renewed for Comic Book Men – but that’s different because it’s not scripted. Now I’m being pulled into the scripted world. MGM said, ‘hey we hear you like Buckaroo Banzai‘. They heard that because of a fucking podcast I did in New York at the Lincoln Centre with Peter Weller and John Lithgow where we watched Buckaroo Banzai and I talked about how much I loved it. So they called my agent and said, ‘we think we’d like to talk to him about it because we turned Fargo into a TV show and it’s won awards and shit and there’s another property we want to do that with.’
“This was my childhood, this is the reason I make fucked up movies and don’t make movies like J.J. Abrams. A: I’m not talented, and B: shit like Buckaroo Banzai appeals to me. They didn’t do it left of centre, they didn’t do it straight down the line. It’s a very funny movie, very weird. So because of the weird movies I’ve done like Tusk and Yoga Hosers and TV work like The Flash, people went, ‘2+2=5, let’s bring him in’. So i went in and talked with some cats about what you would do to turn this into a series. And I was like, ‘on my lord I’ve loved this movie forever so you just do that. Do the entire movie for season one and then season two you do the sequel we’ve always dreamed of: Buckaroo Banzai vs. The World Crime League. So we went back and forth and before we knew it we were in business together. Next month we take it out and try and find a home for it. These cats are very good at finding homes for things, and there’s already some people going, ‘oh shit’ who have heard early and are interested. So if all goes well, I think we’ll be doing Buckaroo Banzai as a series.
“I’m going to reach out to the guys who created it, who created these worlds. It’s sci-fi, but not sci-fi. It’s very comic book-y. It was this franchise that was supposed to go on, but it lived and died with this movie that never found an audience. The studio who released it didn’t know what to do with it. It found its audience long since on video and for years they talked about a sequel, but now a TV show is the way to go. I want to go back to everyone involved and have them in the show, not playing the same characters probably but playing the bad guys. I’d have Peter Weller, if you know Buckaroo Banzai there’s a Joker like character or his Lex Luthor that they didn’t put in the movie but he’s in the comic book and the novelisation by Earl Mac Rauch. He was the guy who killed his parents, so I would go to Peter Weller and be like, ‘dude you gotta be Hanoi Xan’. Because Peter Weller brought Buckaroo Banzai to life with his performance, so it would be cool in our mythology if he created Buckaroo Banzai because he killed his parents and we flick the switch. So Peter can play a villain which we’ve seen him do in Star Trek, and he’s a real sweet guy. That podcast I did with him about Buckaroo Banzai, I did another one with him here about Dark Knight Returns. He was so fucking sweet. He comes on stage and grabs the mic and is like, ‘let me tell you a story about this guy in the hockey jersey. I had no idea who he was and then a few months ago he had me and Lithgow introduce a movie that I didn’t get and I still don’t get and he spoke eloquently for five minutes about the movie, and I turned to Lithgow and I said, ‘if this fat guy was here when the movie was out we would have made billions!”.
Smith also went on to mention that he would appear in the series, alongside regular collaborator Jason Mewes and his Hollywood Babble-On co-host Ralph Garman.
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Originally published May 16, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
