Arrested Development: 10 Insane Details You Definitely Missed
3. Buster’s In-Car Dance To “Mr. Roboto” Was A Callback
In the third season of Arrested Development, there's a scene where Buster is sitting inside the Stair Car. The scene is a flashback explanation of how he lost his hook, which shows him happily dancing to the Styx song "Mr. Roboto" while excitedly raising and lowering his arms in true robot fashion.
He slams his hook into the dash of the car, which explains how he lost it, but there's more to the scene than meets the eye. Tony Hale, the actor who plays Buster Bluth, was effectively re-shooting a commercial he did back in 1999 for Volkswagen.
In the commercial, Hale is sitting inside a VW, moving about like a madman. He's dancing in his seat, honking the horn, and moving in much the same way Buster does on the show. When the door is opened by the person he's driving about, the song blares out of the radio with a voiceover touting the car's eight-speaker system.
This is one of those scenes few people picked up on unless they recalled the commercial. It aired six years before the AD episode, so a viewer would have to be paying incredibly close attention to catch the homage to Hale's previous work.