Meanwhile in another dimension....
The Origins of the Buckaroo Banzai television series is shrouded in mystery, contradictions and the bizarre. It has become a thing of urban legend. One story claims writer Earl Mac Rauch was approached by an unidentified individual at a party in the late 1970s, who claimed to work for a top secret think tank called the Banzai Institute and that they wanted to recruit Rauch to join their organization as their media representative. Rauch supposedly was employed by the Banzai Institute for many years, and his experiences with them are the inspiration for the characters and events depicted in the series.
Another story claims that the series was the brainchild of NBC president Brandon Tartikoff after he mysteriously disappeared for three days in September 1983 (Tartikoff was absent for during the key Fall Schedule Promotion launch with no adequate explanation ever given) and upon his return to his Network offices, he greenlit a hereto unknown pilot called The Banzai Files for immediate production. An odd coincidence, during the period Tartikoff was unaccounted for, the space shuttle Columbia experienced "technical difficulties" and was out of contact with NASA for almost 48 hours. This is interesting, as it would be a significant plot point of the Banzai Files tv pilot movie.
The original first draft of the pilot movie was credited to a Reno Nevada. All later drafts list Earl Mac Rauch as the writer and creator. It has led many to speculate that Nevada and Rauch are the same person.
It is also interesting to note, that in the credits of the pilot movie only, that a Reno Nevada is listed as Executive Consultant and there was a title card from the producers thanking the co-operation of the Banzai Institute. While these these specific credits never appeared again in the main series, the show did retain an unusual end title card with a logo for the Banzai Institute and a disclaimer that described the show as a "docuseries" and that the stories and characters were fictionalized versions of real events. When asked about this odd end credit, executive producer Glen Larson said it was just an in house joke. Though in an interview decades later, just days before his death, Larson recanted this statement, claiming there was more truth to story that he was legally allowed to tell and even if he could, he did not think anyone would believe him because it was too extraordinary.
W.D. Richter was brought in to help flesh out Rauch's screenplay, which many NBC executives felt was too convoluted for television audiences. Legend says, Richter was taken by Rauch to the Banzai Institute for an orientation and script retreat for a week and after he returned, close friends claimed Richter behaved like a man on a mission from God himself, as though something had fundamentally changed his entire world view and belief system.
Production on the pilot movie, originally called "Buckaroo Who?", began in the Spring of 1984 with Earl Mac Rauch as writer/producer and W.D. Richter as producer/director. The pilot movie had the largest tv budget of that time of almost 2 million dollars. However, the shoot was plagued with mysterious accidents -- the main set caught fire and was destroyed, the original Jet Car was stolen and never recovered, and lead actor Dack Rambo quit the pilot 3 weeks into production after claiming his life was being threatened by unknown forces.
When the first cut of the pilot movie was delivered to NBC seven weeks late and an additional 1.3 million dollars over budget, it was described by one executive as "an unfathomable three hour disaster". One remarkable element of the pilot that left all executives stunned and excited, was a sequence featuring the Jet Car helping a space shuttle land. To this day, no Special FX House has ever been credited for this incredible sequence and modern experts are still perplexed how the FX was achieved. FX legend John Dykstra once said, if he didn't know better, he would swear the footage was real and not an effect. And it should noted, when the show went to series, it never again had any FX of that caliber or realism again.
To appease the critics of pilot and to save the show, Tartikoff brought in television super producer Glen A. Larson, along with Kenneth Johnson and Donald P. Bellisario, to recut the pilot and shepherd the series moving forward with a 6 episode commitment.
But that is another story....