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An aspiring screenwriter named Ernie Cline wrote a spec screenplay for 'Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League' and made it available on the internet for fans to read back in 1996. He did this purely for his own amusement. This script was in no way associated with or sanctioned by Polygram, Harry Bailly Prod, or Earl Mac Rauch.

The script was picked up by a production company and was shopped around for a little while but nothing happened with it. Ernie eventually removed the script from the web and requested that other website do so as well. He has since reposted it and written a blog entry about the writing of the script. That blog entry from Ernest Cline's website is no longer there, but a cached version is available via the Wayback Machine, and is reproduced here below for archival purposes.

Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League
Posted by Ernie on June 29, 2011

I love all sorts of movies, but when I was younger I would sometimes become unusually fixated on (obsessed with) one film in particular. I would then proceed to watch that film a few million times, while learning everything I could about its production, creators, and screenplay. When I was a kid, Star Wars was my main obsession. Then for awhile it became Highlander. (I remember mail ordering three different drafts of the Highlander screenplay from Script City in Hollywood, just so I could study the evolution of the story/mythology from draft to draft.) Then, sometime in the early 90s, I watched a battered VHS tape of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, and a whole new obsession was born.

I’d missed TABBA8D during it’s original theatrical release in the summer of 1984 because the flick never made it to my hometown. But when I finally did discover the movie on video a few years later, I couldn’t believe what I’d just seen. A sci-fi action comedy about a half-American half-Japanese rock star/brain surgeon/physicist/test pilot/master swordsman/comic book hero/adventurer with his own volunteer private army, fending off an alien invasion from another dimension?! Starring Robocop, The Fly, and The Kurgan? How the hell did a movie this clever, weird, and awesome even get made?

One of my favorites things about Buckaroo Banzai is the film’s sheer bravado. It never spoon feeds its plot to the audience. In fact, it does the exact opposite. With no warning, the viewer is dropped into the middle of an elaborate ongoing storyline and is expected to catch up. I had to watch the movie several times before I started to catch even a fraction of its hidden in-jokes. Then I quickly tracked down the Buckaroo Banzai comic book adaptation, the novelization, and several different drafts of the screenplay. I visited every Buckaroo Banzai website I could find, then I created my own, compiling all of the data, images, and sound and movie files I’d collected.  I wanted to learn everything I could about Buckaroo Banzai’s back story and mythology. But more than anything, I wanted to see the sequel promised just before the film’s end credits:

Of course, by the mid-90s it seemed almost certain that this epic-sounding sequel would never get made. Even though the original film had gained a cult following on video, it had been a total flop at box office, and I’d read that the actual sequel rights were embroiled in some legal mess. Banzai nerds like me all over the world were totally bummed about this. Then, as my fascination (obsession) with all things Buckaroo Banzai continued to grow, an idea gradually occurred to me: I could just write the sequel myself. I’d already spent a lot of time imaging what the storyline might be, so much so that the movie had already started to take form in my head. All I had to do was sit down and write it out…

The only problem was that I’d never actually written a screenplay before. I’d been interested in screenwriting for years, and I’d read dozens of screenplays and books on screenwriting. So I thought this could be a fantastic writing exercise – a way to teach myself to write a feature length screenplay, while also geeking out on one of my favorite films of all time. And I was right. When I sat down at the keyboard and started to write, I got lost in the story, and the script more or less wrote itself in a period of about two weeks in the summer of 1996. I had an absolute blast imaging the movie in my mind’s eye, with no concern for budget, casting, or coherence. And when it was finished, I was pretty proud of the end product, even though it was really just glorified fan fiction. It was the BB sequel I’d always wanted to see, and I knew that other die-hard Banzai fans would probably get a kick out of it. So I posted the script online, where it quickly spread to the far reaches of the Internet. In the months that followed, I received literally hundreds of emails from other Banzai fans writing to tell me how much they enjoyed the script. This was incredibly gratifying, and something I never expected when I was writing it.

As my script continued to spread, I began to see it show up for sale on ebay and at various comic book conventions, usually presented as if it were the genuine article, and not some fan script written by a geek in Ohio. Then, to my shock and delight, Sci-Fi World Magazine ran an article about my script in their Summer 1999 issue, complete with a fake poster for the movie. (It was one of their Ten Most Talked About Movies You’ll Never See. Not very prophetic – so far, seven of the flicks on that list have been made and most have spawned many sequels.)

I took the script offline a few years later, because I was worried it might hurt my chances of being taken seriously as a “real screenwriter.” But now I know that the only difference between a “legitimate” spec script and fanfic is that one is written for money, the other out of love. Over the years I’ve continued to get emails from people who have read and enjoyed my script or who are anxious to read it. Since this summer marks the 15th anniversary of my Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League script, I’ve decided to put it back online for other Banzai fans to enjoy. You can download it right here.

I hope you dig my Team Banzai fanfic spec script. And remember: The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen all at once.

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This page was last updated on February 6th, 2021.
Maintained by Sean Murphy [figment@figmentfly.com]