I meet the author of the book at a convention years ago and asked him about the watermelon. He said someone higher up started micromanaging the director big time about halfway through the movie. Director put it there without anybody's approval so there would be one thing in the movie that was his decision alone.

Personally, I submitted it mostly because I thought it fit the aesthetic of an 80's B movie. Plus, it was a huge box office flop that has since become a cult classic, which seems like another characteristic of B movies.

I suspect that it's not an accident that it's so memorable.

Throughout the movie, there's all of this plot stuff going on. That's of course to be expected, since that's what movies do.

But at the same time, there's little bits and pieces of the theme song coming together in the background.

Then the story ends dramatically, and with a touching and heart-warming coda, and what's the Lectroid's reaction? "So what? Big deal."

Then the closing theme plays. And that's the real culmination of the movie.

Sometimes I would expect some sort of targeted advertising to be responsible, but I heard about the film through the most random means I can imagine:

A friend went to a Halloween party and saw a guy wearing alpaca chaps as his costume (because he had just gotten back from...Ecuador, I think?). My partner was shown a picture of said chaps and was describing them to her work friends, when a different coworker overheard and excitedly interrupted "like the guy from Buckaroo Banzai?!" At which point everyone stared at him until he told us about the movie, which he hadn't seen since about 2001.

Either way, it's definitely now on the watchlist, to be sure. Did you find it on a streaming service?