The Old School Reference You Might Not Have Picked Up on in Ready Player One

Ready Player One exploded into theaters on the finish of March and introduced with it a tidal wave of nostalgia. In addition to a soundtrack filled with sing-along ready ’80s tunes, Steven Spielberg‘s sci-fi action-adventure movie packs in each popular culture reference it presumably can. In between transient appearances from King Kong, the Iron Giant, and Jurassic Park‘s T-Rex (to call only a few), there’s one reference to a personality from 1984 in specific that may have left you scratching your head: Buckaroo Banzai.

During one scene about midway by means of the movie, Wade (Tye Sheridan) has plans to go to a dance membership in the OASIS as his Parzival avatar to satisfy up with Art3mis (Olivia Cooke). In order to correctly impress her, he goes by means of a collection of iconic ’80s film character costumes till he lastly settles on the rumpled swimsuit and tie combo of Buckaroo Banzai, a personality from the sci-fi journey comedy The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the eighth Dimension! As far as ’80s characters go, Buckaroo Banzai is not precisely as well-known as Freddy Krueger, for instance (who additionally pops up in the film FYI), but it surely’s exactly because of this that Art3mis is so impressed.

The 1984 movie, sometimes shortened to only Buckaroo Banzai, follows Peter Weller’s adventurer/mind surgeon/rock star Buckaroo Banzai (think about what his LinkedIn appears like) as he groups up together with his loyal group of crime fighters — the Hong Kong Cavaliers — to cease evil aliens from invading earth. It costars heavy hitters resembling John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum, and Christopher Lloyd, to call a number of.

While, admittedly, we’d have liked to see Parzival parading across the OASIS dressed as Indiana Jones or Michael Jackson‘s character in the “Thriller” video, we are able to admire {that a} Gunter like Art3mis most likely would not have acknowledged simply any commonplace throwback look. Now that we now have that settled, we’ll pop on our VR headset and crank up “Stayin’ Alive” so we are able to follow our floating disco dance routine, in the event you do not thoughts.