HAVE TO FLY. HAVE TO FIGHT. HAVE TO CROW. HAVE TO SAVE MAGGIE, HAVE TO SAVE JACK. HOOK IS BACK.
That damned sentence cannoned around in my head for a solid percentage of my childhood, and well into the adult years as well. So you better bet your backside that I’m paying attention to this.
The bloody fantastic ‘Hook‘ was released just over 25 years ago, planting Robin Williams squarely in the middle of arguably the best ‘Peter Pan‘ film of all-time. I will fight anyone who disagrees, and the fact that it’s only got a 30% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes should be considered treasonous.
But I digress. The film, which also starred Dustin Hoffman as Captain James Hook, Maggie Smith as Wendy Darling, Julia Roberts as Tinkerbell, and Bob Hoskins as Smee, also featured a hot-shit cast of kids as the fabled Lost Boys of Neverland.
Chief among them, their fearless leader Rufio, played by Dante Basco.
25-years-on and Basco still looks back on the role very fondly. So much so that he’s now sure there was story left on the table.
Basco just helped launch a Kickstarter to fund a short film that will serve as something of a prequel to ‘Hook,’ focusing on the backstory of Rufio and what brought him to Neverland.
‘Bangarang‘ will explore the life of Rufio – known as Roofus in this film – as an orphan on the rough streets of Los Angeles. Cop this synopsis:
“Roofus is a 13-year-old kid who is destined to be more than he is. After his mother is forced to put him into a foster home, he and his rag-tag group of best friends – a Jamaican boy named Julani and a bright-eyed latina force of nature named Ella – find a way for Roofus to escape his ill fate, find his happy thought and fulfil his destiny.”“The story has been reverse engineered from what was set-up in Hook. We answer all the questions you’ve ever wondered — How and why is Rufio the leader of the Lost Boys? Where does “bangarang” come from? And of course, how he gets the mohawk.”
The campaign is only seeking to mine $30,000 to bring Rufio back to the screen, and at the time of writing it was already a third of the way there. And with 25 days in the campaign remaining, there’s a fair-to-good chance the film will be surfacing sooner rather than later.
And if the campaign reaches $200k, that short film will become a feature-length badboy.
Anything, really, to breathe new life back into Rufio. The fearless young boy with the unbelievable mohawk.
The one true rude, crude, lewd, bag of pre-chewed food dude. Bless him.
You can get around the crowdfunding campaign via the Kickstarter page.
RU-FEE-OH. RU-FEE-OH. RU-FEE… OHHHHHHHHH.
Source: Kickstarter.
Photo: Hook.
