- Buckaroo Banzai
. 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 in1950 , the son of two scientists: Masado Banzai, a brilliant Japanese researchphysicist whose work in theoreticalquantum mechanics is reported to have "rattled"Albert Einstein , and Sandra Willoughby, the daughter of the eccentric Scottish-bornTexas 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 ofnegative mass propulsion. The couple fled Japan at the outbreak ofWorld War II and eventually settled in Texas. Their son grew up inColorado andArizona and was named "Buckaroo " because of his father's love for theAmerican 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 in1955 in the Texas desert, when Dr. Banzai took the controls of a jet car equipped with an early version of theOscillation Overthruster . But the experiment ended tragically: Buckaroo Banzai's parents were killed in an explosion (caused by sabotage planned by criminal mastermindHanoi Xan ) as the four-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
automobile s. He studiedbujutsu andparticle physics . His skill with asixgun was reputed to eclipse that ofWyatt Earp . He spoke a dozen languages and wrote songs in all of them. His band, theHong Kong Cavaliers, was one of the most popular, hard-rockingbar band s in eastNew Jersey , though its members (bearing names like Rawhide, Reno, the Swede, Perfect Tommy, Big Norse, and Pecos Bill) were not professional musicians at all, but rathercartographer s andbotanist s, linguists and propellant engineers, anentomologist and anepidemiologist . All of them experts in their fields of endeavor, they were drawn to Buckaroo.Further Adventures
After a hiatus of over twenty years, original writers Earl Mac Rauch and W.D. Richter have begun new adventures for Buckaroo Banzai, in the form of a comic book produced by
Moonstone Books . The new story, the three issue mini-series 'Return of the Screw', which was published onSeptember 15 ,2007 , picks up where the film left off.According to the Moonstone Books website, in March 2008 the prequel to 'Adventures in The 8th Dimension,' which will be aptly titled 'Of Hunan Bondage,' will be published.
Other Media
Buckaroo Banzai and several other members of Team Banzai are prominently featured in the
Battletech universe, a science fiction world taking place in the 31st century. It is not clearly explained how they find themselves in the future other than some sort of time warp, either intentional or inadvertent, but he occupies himself in that era as a professor at the New Avalon Institute of Science on the world of New Avalon within theFederated Suns successor state and is also a Battlemech designer, having designed the Hatchetman and Axeman mechs according to the sourcebooks "Battletech Technical Readout 3025" and "Battletech Technical Readout 3050". He is also featured as a character in some of the Battletech novels written by Michael Stackpole.
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