@Egon1982 said:

I did when i lived in St Louis when i was 4 and been one of my fave fantasy and action and comedy movies ever.

I did not but it remains one of my favorite movies. Bought the Blu-Ray version when it was eventually released.

Lucky you! Wasn't it a bit of a flop at release?

All round fun movie.

Yup it was a flop but became a cult fave on video, cable, laserdisc, DVD, blu-ray, TV and all that over the years.

This film was tremendously popular with me and my friends/acquaintances in the mid-late 80's so I had taken it for granted that it must have done pretty well when first released. It was a real surprise to learn it had flopped.

Apparently the studio did a piss-poor job at marketing it.

You know, I honestly can't remember but I don't think I did. I remember seeing the movie on the marquee at the Southcenter Theater here in Washington at the time. When it was released, many of us thought it was a cheap rip-off of the Indiana Jones movies. This was, of course, before we'd seen the actual film and could understand that it was nothing at ALL like those films. It was rather poorly marketed, to say the least.

I do, however, remember seeing Yor: Hunter from the Future , Krull , and Hardware in the theater. Those were quite the achievements, since none of them lasted more than a couple weeks in the theaters. Ask me about those! (Actually, please don't.)

Wish I could say the same. I caught this movie on Amazon Prime a couple of years back and it quickly became one of my favorite movies. The funny one liners and the overall absurdity of the plot really hit this one out of the park for me.

This movie and The Thing are my two favorite John Carpenter films

I read somewhere that the original plan for this was the buckaroo banzai sequel

not sure how true that was

Saw this in a single screen theater at a small downtown location. The seats were red velvet and were super comfy and I found $14 bucks in the cup holder when I sat down. It was the last movie shown there before they closed due to the multiplexes.

I did.

Here in the UK it was slightly censored to get a PG rating on release, I guess Fox were trying to maximize revenue.

@Gus Gorman said:

I did.

Here in the UK it was slightly censored to get a PG rating on release, I guess Fox were trying to maximize revenue.

What was cut? It's one of the few 15 cert films that I'll let my kids watch and apart from one f-bomb (which is why I assume it got the wrath of the BBFC slapping a '15' on it) this is definitely no worse than many other PG films of the day...

Anyway, I first saw it on video back in about 1987-88 - I was under-aged and my neighbour rented it for me, my parents weren't happy, but they gave up being too strict with what I watched at that age when they found a dodgy copy of A Nightmare on Elm St. 3 in my bedroom...!