A young John Travolta made Grease watchable—and a huge box-office smash
Image: Photo: Moviepix Film Features The Popcorn Champs
John Travolta was 24 years old when he became quite possibly the biggest movie star in the world. Travolta, a high-school dropout from New Jersey, had entered America’s living rooms two years earlier as a wisecracking Brooklyn high-school meatball in the hit sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter. Then he made two back-to-back smashes: one deeply depressing gritty-realist social drama, one sunny and cheesy retro musical. Both movies, different as they might have been, where built around the spectacle of John Travolta shaking his ass. The first of those movies, Saturday Night Fever, was a cultural sensation that made Travolta one of the youngest Best Actor Oscar nominees in history. The second, Grease, was the single biggest box-office hit of 1978.
Saturday Night Fever, which came out at the tail end of 1977, made for a very strange box-office success. It’s a truly depressing movie. Travolta’s Tony Manero is a deeply flawed character, one who’s really only good at dancing. Over the course of the film, Tony’s life falls apart. He quits his job, gets into meaningless brawls, watches his friend die and his family disintegrate, and attempts rape. Tony’s a rough hang. But he’s a perfect character for the stammering, strutting, inarticulate, beautiful John Travolta. The film truly comes alive whenever Travolta dances.
Saturday Night Fever producer Robert Stigwood did not waste any time capitalizing on what he had with Travolta. Six months after Saturday Night Fever opened, Travolta was back up on screens in another Stigwood production. This time around, Travolta was still dancing, but he wasn’t doing anything depressing.
You’d be hard-pressed to find an actor better-suited for a major film role than John Travolta in Grease. Travolta knew the material in Grease; as a high-school dropout in the early ’70s, he’d landed his first acting job in a touring production of the stage musical. (He played Doody.) As in Welcome Back, Kotter, Grease features Travolta as a good-looking, mouthy high-school kid. In Grease, as in Saturday Night Fever, the world stops whenever it’s time for Travolta to dance. Travolta also had aspirations at pop stardom. In 1976, he’d made it into the Top 10 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 with a truly wretched ballad called “Let Her In.” Grease gives him plenty of chances to sing. “You’re The One That I Want,” the first single from the Grease soundtrack—the second-biggest album of 1978, behind the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack—was a No. 1 hit by the time the movie opened.
In Grease, Travolta is at the absolute height of his powers. He’s in the opening scene, doing a knowingly cheesy From Here To Eternity beach-romance montage. But he gets a proper movie-star entrance a few minutes later: a zoom-in, a turnaround, a smirk perfectly timed to a soundtrack cymbal-ting. All throughout Grease, Travolta clearly understands and delights in his own movie-star appeal. He overplays everything, and he brings the same weird intense-guy-trying-to-be-cool vibe that he still has now. But he gets away with it because he looks the way he looks, and because he moves the way he moves. He’s a force charismatic enough to reinvent the ’50s teensploitation movie and to make it feel sexy.
Grease was really Travolta’s show. The film had a cast full of stage veterans, including a couple who’d been in the musical’s original Broadway run. And it was jammed with performances from ex-teen idols (Frankie Avalon, Edd Byrnes) and ’50s-vintage TV faces (Joan Blondell, Dody Goodman, 1945 Oscar winner Eve Arden). ’50s sketch comic Sid Caesar came on board when Paramount refused to let Stigwood cast porn star Harry Reems as the Rydell High football coach. But Travolta was the one who made all the important staffing decisions. He pushed for Stigwood to hire young director Randal Kleiser, who’d never made a theatrical film but had directed Travolta in the 1976 TV movie The Boy In The Plastic Bubble. And Travolta also suggested Olivia Newton-John as his co-star.
The English-born and Australian-raised Newton-John was a huge name by 1978, but she was famous for singing drippy ballads, not uptempo show tunes. The Sandy role had to be rewritten to suit her, since she couldn’t do a convincing American accent. And she’d never done much acting besides a starring role in Toomorrow, a Don Kirshner-produced 1970 psychedelic musical that was deemed unwatchable and quickly shelved.
Travolta got what he wanted because he was clearly the main draw in Grease. Without him, it would be entirely unwatchable. The film has the vague outline of a story: a guy and a girl like each other, but bad decisions and misunderstandings keep them apart until the final climactic makeout. But those story beats really just serve to string together the songs and set pieces. The whole film has an antic vaudeville feel. The high-school students all look old as hell. (Some of the actors playing them were past 30.) They act like Three Stooges understudies and talk like Jerky Boys. Boys stare up skirts and moon cameras. Girls chew gum and sneak bottles of dessert wine. The whole thing ends with a musical number made up almost entirely of hepcat gibberish and the goofy-surreal vision of a hot rod floating off into the sky. It’s pure weightless fantasia. Travolta sells it anyway.
Storywise, Grease does not give Travolta a whole lot to do. For instance, the only evidence that his character, Danny Zuko, is willing to change for Sandy is a brief few seconds of him wearing a letterman sweater after some weak attempts at becoming a jock. But Travolta throws himself physically into everything that the movie gives him. He lurches into a full-on Elvis Presley impersonation—something that probably had an extra sentimental appeal in 1978, since Presley himself had died less than a year earlier. He does an absurd side-shuffle while combing his hair. And in the showstopping hand-jive scene, my favorite bit from the movie, he holds together a whole lot of chaotic silliness by managing to peacock effectively while doing frantic antique dance steps.
In a way, though, John Travolta was not the biggest star in Grease. The biggest star was the entire idea of the 1950s. Grease was the culmination of a whole cultural wave of ’50s nostalgia that absolutely dominated popular culture in the 1970s. The phenomenon may have started before the ’70s even did, when sock-hop revivalists Sha Na Na played in the final hours of Woodstock, just before Jimi Hendrix. And the original Grease stage music was an early part of that wave as well. The play debuted at Chicago’s Kingston Mines nightclub in 1971 (authors Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey based it on their experiences at Taft High School on the city’s northwest side). A year later, it came to New York, became a massive Broadway hit, and played for the next eight years.
But Grease was only part of it. The first oldies radio station launched in Phoenix in 1971, and the format spread quickly. Happy Days, a sitcom about Midwestern malt-shop kids, came to TV in 1974; it stayed on the air for a decade and launched a whole series of spinoffs. In the mid-’70s, pop charts were dominated by covers of oldies from the early ’60s: The Carpenters doing “Please Mr. Postman,” Linda Ronstadt doing “You’re No Good,” Ringo Starr doing “You’re Sixteen.” Pre-Beatles hitmakers like Neil Sedaka, Johnny Mathis, and the Four Seasons staged comebacks. Rock ’n’ roll pioneer Chuck Berry scored the only No. 1 hit of his career with a terrible 1972 novelty song about his dick.
And then there was American Graffiti, George Lucas’s warm-hearted comedy about teenagers cruising around and blasting the radio on a single night in 1963 Modesto. Lucas had a feel for the material; he’d been one of those kids. The film, made for less than a million dollars, was a surprise smash, one of the highest grossers of its year. (Its star, Richard Dreyfuss, went on to become the guy who beat Travolta for that Best Actor Oscar.) American Graffiti gave Lucas the cultural capital to make Star Wars, and it supercharged the nostalgia that was already in the air. In a way, then, Grease was the first post-George Lucas blockbuster. It was just surfing on the waves of American Graffiti, not Star Wars.
Looking back, that long stretch of ’50s nostalgia is a rich historical text. America spent much of the ’70s trying to make sense of the various convulsions of the late ’60s—the protests, the riots, the assassinations—as well as the great American boondoggles of Vietnam and Watergate. At the same time, Americans also rushed to consume any cultural artifact that reminded them of the era before the JFK shooting, of the time that was supposed to be so much more innocent.
Grease takes full advantage of that innocence. For the most part, the kids in the movie are horny in a safe, friendly, slapsticky sort of way, except for some dialogue and song lyrics that have really aged poorly (“sloppy seconds,” “pussy wagon,” “Did she put up a fight?”). But they’re not much concerned about the state of the world. Like the other ’50s-revival movies and TV shows of the ’70s, Grease doesn’t attempt to reckon with the bad things about the ’50s—Jim Crow laws, McCarthy hearings, widespread repression. (The most serious thing about Grease is a quickly-dismissed pregnancy-scare subplot.) Instead, Grease works in all the obvious ’50s cliches: the drive-in movie, the drag race, the diner. It’s a comforting vision that never aims to be anything else.
That’s how Grease has remained a perennial for those who don’t remember the ’50s or the ’70s. It’s a big, silly, willfully naive set of gestures, set to songs that absolutely refuse to leave your head. That’s its legacy, and how it’s retained its power as a pop-cultural touchstone over decades.
If Grease was the first post-American Graffiti blockbuster, then the world didn’t have to wait long before the second. A month later came the release of National Lampoon’s Animal House, a frat-party comedy set in 1962 that became 1978’s No. 2 highest grosser. Animal House was a little more frank than Grease in its horniness, and it was a little more willing to confront both the hypocrisies of that age and the cultural ruptures on the horizon. But it’s just as loving a depiction of its era. Maybe those two movies represent the last gasps of a cultural fixation. Or maybe they’re just the beginning. After all, two years later, America elected a ’50s movie star president after he promised to make the country great again.
The contender: John Carpenter’s Halloween, a micro-budget indie horror, spawned decades of sequels and imitators. The film almost singlehandedly invented the ’80s slasher flick, putting all the genre tropes into place: the doomed teenage hornballs, the masked killer, the suburban setting, the final girl, the fakeout happy ending. But long after all those things hardened into cliché, Halloween remains a gripping spectacle.
Carpenter has a Hitchcockian sense of tension, and he uses every trick in his limited budget—the long shadows, the cheap masks, the eerily pulsing synth score that he had to do himself—to ratchet up that foreboding. It’s why the early place-setting scenes are more powerful than the carnage that follows. In Jamie Lee Curtis, the daughter of Hitchcock’s Psycho heroine Janet Leigh, Carpenter found a young actor with the gravity to hold all the shocks together. And in the unkillable evil force Michael Myers, Carpenter and producer/co-writer Debra Hill invented an evil blank enough to capture imaginations.
Next time: ’70s social realism gets one last big moment with the Dustin Hoffman/Meryl Streep divorce drama Kramer Vs. Kramer.
319 Comments
I saw Grease in the movie theater. I was 6. Plotlines about Rizzo’s period and lyrics about making the girls cream definitely went over my head, but I loved it. Everyone I knew had the soundtrack album, and we spent the next year or two recreating the dance moves in each other’s living rooms.
I wanted to be blonde haired and blue eyed like Olivia Newton-John. I thought high school would be a cross between Grease and Marcia & Greg in The Brady Bunch. Suffice to say, no one was bursting into song in my high school.
Yes, I was 10 when I saw Grease for the first time. Lots went over my head and I was very disappointed by real high school as well!
Yeah, it would have gone about like this at my school…
Thank you for posting this, mostly because the noise Martin makes when Nelson punches him has consistently cracked me up from the very moment it first aired.
Mr. Burns’ “THANK you” is what makes it for me.
In 6th grade I actually got the role of Danny in the middle-school production of Grease, and my mother made me drop out of the show for exactly this reason. Overall it was a good decision, since my school and classmates were all awful. Good thing my parents paid money for that godawful place, rather than sending me to (shudder) the public school right near our house.
I want to make a joke since that’s what I pretty much always do, but that’s pretty rough parenting.
Of COURSE! That’s where that’s from! Your Simpsons post jogged my memory, bfred. I was like, “Where did I hear that Chuck Berry thing?”
I thought “lousy with virginity” meant she was bad at virginity, whatever that was.
Omigod. Were we friends? I can remember a dance contest that we had at a slumber party in 1979 (I think that was 4th grade) using my friend’s Grease LP. It was the best.
Indeed, high school was a disappointment although now that I am in my late 40’s my husband and I will burst into song or dance in public occasionally. Making up for lost opportunities, I guess.
Someone’s in love!!
1. It hasn’t aged well is an understatement. 2. The soundtrack propelled that movie! It was everywhere and everyone sang it from 7 year olds to 40 year olds.
I watched the (figurative) shit out of this movie in junior high to the point I almost had the whole thing memorized. Then filed it away. Recently though it was playing at our local bar for some reason, and I couldn’t even watch it. Partly it was triggering bad memories from junior high, but also a lot of the movie just isn’t that good, and even worse through modern eyes.
Grease really was a constant middle school thing for me too.
I think the background dancers during “We Go Together” are super fun to watch. They’re my favorite part of those last few minutes.
That whole scene is such a wonderful production, with the rides twirling in the background, etc. The planning around staging and choreography must have been epic.To OP’s point, of course the soundtrack propelled the movie. It barely has enough plot to fill a half-hour sitcom without them. And that’s OK!
Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. And the sub-plot was different boy meets different girl, loses girl, gets girl.
It still lives on in high school performances, although I assume often in an even more sanitized versions.
Oh yeah, much more sanitized. I was shocked when actually watching the film in how adult it was. My high school drama teacher rewrote it, either out of whimsy or because he didn’t want to pay for the rights, into Greece. An ancient-Greek version with pretty much everything else being the same. It was kind of amazing.
Full disclosure; when I first heard the title, I thought it was about or set in Greece. Then I saw the poster and it clicked like “Ooohh…”
Saturday Night Fever is a fantastic film – honest and ugly in a way that so much ‘70s cinema can be. Goodbye Girl is a good romcom and Richard Dreyfuss is great in it, but Travolta deserved the Oscar that year – the way he took Tony from cocky disco king to a broken man sickened by the slow realization that he was immersed in misogyny and racism was just phenomenal. Joseph Cali also deserved a Supporting nomination for his work as Tony’s brother – the scene where he tells a stunned Tony that he’s leaving the priesthood is what sets Tony’s breakdown in motion, and is one of the film’s high points. (Bruno Cremer and Roy Scheider also deserved Supporting and Lead nominations for Sorcerer but that’s a whole other topic) My only complaint about the movie is they did not do a good job of handling his attempted rape of Stephanie – they gloss over his actions and Stephanie’s forgiveness of him as he is still our leading man (the deleted scenes show a somewhat darker final scene between them), although at least Badham did not end the film with them in a romantic relationship. I can’t deny that Travolta was the biggest reason Grease was a hit. I also thought he was pretty good in the movie, especially as he fully committed to flat out cheese that many would have been embarrassed by (like “Sandy” – eesh) and made audiences see that there’s nothing wrong with such corniness. He also had great chemistry with not only Olivia Newton-John, but also Annette Charles (which was necessary as they were supposed to be exes) and Jeff Conaway (the little moment in the movie where he and Kenickie hug and get emotional and then remember they’re supposed to be ‘cool’ is one of my favorites). There are lots of things I enjoy about Grease – many of the musical numbers, the mix of coarseness alongside innocence (always the best way to do nostalgia, I think), Olivia Newton-John (who is endearing enough to avoid Sandy being insufferably twee), the fantastic cast of TV and film legends young and old (Dinah Manhoff does so much with so little, and I just love Didi Conn’s sweet Frenchie) – but Stockard Channing is the main factor that drew me into the movie and keeps me there. Yes, Channing was, like most of the cast, way too old for the role, and yes, Rizzo was not especially likeable, but she was so brittle and so fragile in ways I could understand, and Channing played the hell out of the role. Of all the paper-thin stories in Grease, Rizzo’s was the one I cared about – I wanted her to be happy with Kenickie because that’s what she wanted. And “There Are Worst Things To Do” is when everything of Grease comes together – the toughness, the nostalgia, the well-meaning, heart-tugging sap.
Sorcerer – now there’s the movie I want to talk about. Halloween may have been the tension-filled beginning of an era, but Sorcerer was the tension-filled end of an era.
Oh I could go on and on about Sorcerer. The theme is as relevant as ever today (I don’t just mean about geopolitical stuff, I mean the numbness and acceptance of how much control you have over your life), the worldbuilding and tension-setting are superb, the set pieces are some of the best I’ve ever seen, with actors who at times look genuinely terrified for their lives (they very well may have been…). The haunting and complex ending. And yes there are all the behind the scenes stories and general Friedkin stories. I don’t think there’s been anything on AV Club about the movie in 5-6 years, but hopefully they’ll try another topic on it someday.
No doubt about what you say about the hair raising nature of making Sorcerer, especially from looking at this. One more thing to add, the Tangerine Dream soundtrack. Like The Keep, their music really made the production something else.
That scene on the bridge (the one in the thumbnail) isn’t really available in a good clip, not in the US anyway I don’t think, but that’s definitely the “oh shit” moment for me. When the truck is bearing up closer and closer to Amidou and he starts screaming in panic – no matter how many times I see that I still find myself thinking just for a second how insane and how dangerous and how brilliant the moment is. The soundtrack (which they composed without actually seeing the film) is one of those very of its time and yet very ahead of its time, and absolutely perfect. I saw a review which wished Friedkin had used more of it in the movie because of how effective it is. I think it’s always better to not go overboard, but I get their point. This sequence is really the ideal blend of music and film:
The part that has stuck with me (moreso, there are so many great images in this brilliant movie) is SPOILER Schneider finally walking the crate in, everything on fire, and just collapsing on the ground, the music rising through all of this. God damn is this an amazing movie. Also, no offense to Grease but I could not be more pleased to see its discussion being hijacked for Sorcerer, which still doesn’t get talked about enough.
That’s a gorgeous scene. The way it’s filmed, initially I almost feel a little frightened as he stumbled toward the camera, like he’s walking towards us, like he’s a zombie (the shot is worthy of the best zombie films…). The moment is just enhanced even more by the music which seems so funereal. What should be a moment of triumph isn’t taken away from, but is also made into something that feels like a moment of death. Scheider’s character seems to slowly die throughout the journey, his skin becoming more and more gray, losing his hat and his jacket that help make him who he is, and being increasingly helpless to various forces. The film could have ended right there and been a masterpiece, but choosing to take us a little further ahead just makes the actual ending even more tricky and compelling for me (I probably interpret the ending the wrong way but I see it as sort of a rebirth for the character and a sort of restart for the whole narrative). And I’m so glad other people enjoy talking about the movie – I figured I’d just get one like if I was lucky.
Yes! Zombie-like is exactly right, which is an interesting twist on that concept, the white guy is now the deathless worker. I’m not as optimistic as you about the ending but agree it makes a great film even greater.
I sort of go back and forth because for me the stuff right before he asks the woman at the bar to dance is already so bleak, more bleakness on top of that would be a bit overkill. The way that moment is shot is so beautiful to me that it feels a bit like a process of healing and starting over before the whole cycle kickstarts again. I’m sort of talking out of my ass though. Whatever the intention, I’m glad Friedkin kept the last moment offcamera.
Friedkin was a big fan of the band and originally wanted them to do the music for “The Exorcist” as well. Mike Oldfield was a stand in and is cashing those royalty checks to this day.
blank check
Considering it was a remake of a (great) 1953 French film, it also qualifies as a piece of fifties nostalgia.On a side note, I met Roy Scheider once and he was kind enough to talk to me for about fifteen minutes. He was a really nice, everyday Joe kind of a guy.
That’s a lovely story. I know he wasn’t too happy with the end result of Sorcerer, but he’s just fantastic in it – that long closeup of him near the end of the film will always haunt me. And of course he was amazing in so many other films. He never got the credit he deserved.
Damn, I love Sorcerer. My brother somehow convinced my entire family to watch that for a movie night, and we all ended up raving about it. One of the most gripping movie-watching experiences I’ve ever had.
Wait until next month when -I hope – Tom talks about the impact of Apocalypse Now and/or All That Jazz in relation to Kramer vs. Kramer.
Man, I love me some All That Jazz…need to do a rewatch now that I’ve seen Fosse/Verdon
It’s an excellent film. In the meantime, I think I avoided Fosse/Verdon only because I only wanted to see only Roy Scheider and Leland Palmer play those (slightly fictionalized) roles. I’ll check it out.
It’s excellent. Michelle Williams virtually disappears into Gwen. Oh, and you’ll get to see Roy Scheider making All That Jazz… played by Lin Manuel Miranda. It’s priceless.
It’s good, but I kept seeing Scheider…he made Bob Fosse his own in some weird way.
It DID make me look up some All That Jazz trivia…the gal who plays his mistress/GF in the movie played herself!
Ooooh fuuuuck yes! Love that movie. Have I played Spintires:Mudrunner with the Tangerine Dream soundtrack playing in the background?Yes….
Thanks for the shout-out to Stockard Channing. If Travolta was the reason to watch it when it first came out, she’s the reason to go back to it now. She does so much with so little material.
And thanks for “Sorcerer.” I saw it in the theater, and that scene on the bridge created incredible tension. I don’t know that I have ever been more nervous in an audience environment. A friend of mine made me watch “Wages of Fear” immediately afterward, and was horrified that I though “Sorcerer” was a better movie. I’ve seen them again since, and they are both brilliant, but I still say “Sorcerer” improves on the original.
I think that was one of the reasons the movie got panned – the mere thought of remaking it (I know Friedkin doesn’t consider it a remake, etc.) was seen as a sin. I think it’s one of the rare examples of two versions each having their own strengths, but that seemed to be a bridge too far (no pun intended) for many in 1977. Geez I wish I could’ve seen this in the theater. Stockard has so much effortless magnetism as Rizzo. I think of stuff like “Look At Me, I’m Sandra Dee,” which in the wrong hands could just be generic ‘mean girl’ material, but she makes it fun and playful too (batting her eyelashes, shaking her pelvis, etc.).
I first watched the movie on an old VHS, which I’m pretty sure was the main way to see it for a long time, and it still was incredible. I made sure to go during the theatrical re-release a few years back and an already-great movie became even better. EDIT: Also, watching it for the first time let me finally get the bridge reference (complete with fake Tangerine Dream!) in Mr. Plow, it still blows my mind a TV show would drop that in despite probably 99 percent of viewers not having any idea what it was on about.
There’s also a version which aired on various foreign networks that has some additional footage and cut out the prologue. Most of the additional footage focuses on Jackie and Nilo and sort of puts Jackie into the lead role more (in the finished film I feel like it’s a little more split between Jackie and Victor). Friedkin had nothing to do with this cut and was angry over it, but I do hope we might get those scenes somewhere someday. Here’s a little bit about them –https://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=4978
The Simpsons were great like that. It also reminds me of the scene in Caddyshack when Danny shows up to the yacht club in his captain’s duds and Spalding greets him with “Ahoi, polloi.” Again, I bet very few people even caught that but I love that the writers dropped it in anyway.
There Are Worse Things I Could Do is a wonderful insight into the mindset of a teen girl that the world has labeled bad, but inside is still just a vulnerable young woman.
Until I finally saw it, I assumed Saturday Night Fever was essentially just like Grease, but with disco instead of doo-wop rock and roll. Oh, my, was I wrong! It fits far better within the sub-genre of films set and filmed during NYC’s most rotten decade.
Every trailer of the film and most pop culture memories are only about that and even the non-disco parts that are remembered are more lighthearted (like the family dinner). I think people just willed away all the grimness, somehow, but Badham managed to marry the two worlds (another of the film’s pivotal moments being Tony’s disgust at knowing he beat a better dance pair just because he and Stephanie were white). Badham said he lost jobs because of how tough the movie was. It’s a credit to Travolta that he used his clout at the time to get that made as it wouldn’t have been within a few years.
Once Sat Night Fever became a phenomenon—particularly the soundtrack—a PG edit was reissued to theatres. I have no idea how well it did, or even how they edited it, though I think it may have also been what ended up on TV initially. As a big disco fan, I think its success also really marked when disco saturation in the mainstream (and often not very good disco) started the disco backlash—suddenly everyone wanted to go to discos, they popped up in strip malls in suburbia, etc.
Disco becoming a fad coincided with the economic woes and self-loathing of the country to find a reason to lash out at black and queer people. Disco had the last laugh – it just got some name changes, and the best music still lives on today – but the ugliness of stuff like that Disco Sucks rally will always remind me how easy it is to regress and to be shut down.
The entire point of disco was escapism from a very rough period in America’s history.
Surprised Breihan didn’t mention Travolta going back to the well just a couple of years later with Urban Cowboy.
New York was in very bad shape then, but “most rotten decade” isn’t really fair. Some of the greatest culture and social fabric and political heroism happened here during those years, and they’re a very fond memory for a lot of people.
They sure tried to make it like that for the West End/Broadway musical (which I don’t think turned a profit on either coast but did well in tours and on cruise ships where it’s still done–that kinda show). And of course there’s the sequel…
Yes to all of this! “There are worse things I could do” is one of the truly great musical movie moments, she acts the h**l out of the song!
She’s the reason it works, but it’s also probably the show’s strongest song–in the stage score or the mishmash film score (and arguably the one that sounds the most “Broadway”)
I used to watch both of these movies back to back when I was a teen. I didn’t really have a great relationship with my dad and he looked a lot like John Travolta (Skinny frame, blue eyes, thick black hair and cleft chin). I used to watch them to feel closer to him, and maybe understand him more. Of course it only made me a huge Travolta fan. Eventually our relationship got better, so it all worked out in the end.
Grease is just a pure fun musical that kids in my school loved as we grew up in the 80’s.
Sure you can look back on some of it and question some of the optics. Sandy has get a make over to get her guy? Okay. Whatever. Can we have another song please? The T-Birds and Pink Ladies were the coolest thing in the world to this Gen Xer.
I get why people may see the message of the film as sexist, and with a different tone and actress I suppose it could have seemed like Robert Stigwood’s A Doll’s Grease, but the whole movie is so silly that I just sort of see it as Sandy wearing a costume for a few hours rather than her actually changing herself for a man. She’s still the same sweet Olivia Newton John – no one would want her to change. Since we see him also try to change for her I think the message is probably neither of them would be happy actually changing – it’s just the producers figured a moment with both of them in tight trousers was a better money-maker than a moment where they both dress sedately.
I think the point is each was willing to change in order to be with the other, despite both having already chosen to accept the other as-is.
That’s a pretty tortured sentence but you get my point.
Some of the edgier (if you can call anything Grease edgy) satire got lost as the show moved from Chicago where it was much more vulgar, to off-Broadway, to Broadway, to film and now to the largely film inspired revivals. But the Sandy reveal in the original was quite clearly meant to be satirizing attitudes from teen films, exploitation films, general mores, of the 1950s–not approving of them.
What was the deleted scene you mention?I too love Saturday Night Fever, though it’s a real shame we’re not allowed to see the female version, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which is even darker (that ending, my god), but also features lots of 70’s awesomeness.For some reason you can’t stream it–I think the hangup is the soundtrack.
I haven’t seen Goodbar in a long time, but it really does stay with you – the sick, claustrophobic feeling of her hospital flashbacks in particular. And Diane Keaton, Tom Berenger and Richard Gere are so good (so is Tuesday Weld). The ending is just nightmarish, and even for that era you’re amazed they got away with it. I respect that Keaton took so many chances with her films.It’s not a huge difference, but (I think) in the movie, when he goes to see Stephanie at the end, it’s suggested more that she is willing to talk to him. In a deleted scene, she still doesn’t want to talk to him, but he manages to get into the building anyway, which adds a darker undercurrent to the final scene for me, knowing that he was continuing to push and ignore her wishes.
Super interesting, thanks for sharing that.
Surely Goodbar’s soundtrack could be easily cleared. They cleared the Casablanca/Motown heavy soundtrack for Thank God It’s Friday for crying out loud (which featured disco Diana Ross and Donna Summer just like Goodbar which also was a soundtrack jointly licensed from Casablanca and Motown), so I can’t buy that excuse now.
I love Goodbar but I also kinda hate it. Not because it’s so downbeat but because Richard Brooks’ in his films and adaptions always has a sort of liberal conservative angle (I don’t know how else to explain it). Where I think he thinks, with good intentions, he’s being liberal and supporting the disenfranchised but he always insists on his films returning to the status quo—if that makes any sense. (You really see it in how he rewrote, and completely warped, Tennessee Williams’ plays Sweet Bird of Youth and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Like always, he brings out stunning performances from his actors, but he somehow always seems to miss the point—for me).
But yes, 70s awesomeness.
No, I definitely agree with your take on the movie. It seems to be presenting a tale of female liberation, and then at the end kills her for being liberated. The message seems to be “stay in your box” (or maybe “don’t go chasing waterfalls,” haha).I can’t imagine any other reason why the movie’s not available. So odd.
Yes–that’s exactly what I meant but better said! And, I admit, I can’t think of any reason why it wouldn’t be available aside from soundtrack either (when I rewatched it a few years back it was via a not great quality torrent). I just brought up Thank God It’s Friday because, even as a big disco and Donna Summer fan, I have to admit it’s a pretty terrible movie but it has the same Motown and Casablanca Records acts on its soundtrack as Goodbar (including Summer and Diana Ross) and they didn’t have to replace any of it for the DVD or recent BluRay so if that could be clear, surely someone could bother with Goodbar…
I did some digging after these posts, and I learned two things:1. Lots of people wish Looking for Mr. Goodbar was available.2. Most of those same people think they probably couldn’t watch it a second time, the ending is so harrowing, haha
I love your entire post, especially about the Kenicki/Danny hug, that little bit is hilarious. I was a little kid when my best friend (who was four or five years older than me, I didn’t realize back then she was ‘slow’ as we said in the 70s and 80s) and I became obsessed with this movie. I was probably six or seven and we would ‘play Grease’. She would always want to be Sandy, but I always wanted to be Rizzo, Danny or ChaCha. I will be turning 46 in five days and I still long to play Rizzo in a community theater production of Grease. I figure it should totally be fine for me to play a 17 year old. Plus I can sing the hell out of “Worse Things I Could Do”.Hell, I just had a great idea, next year I’ll stage my own production of Grease and all my friends in our 40s and 50s can play the teenagers! And since it’s my show I’ll play ChaCha and Rizzo and just change wigs.
That sounds like fun. I kind of wish they’d been in the franchise era back then as we may have gotten a Cha Cha and Rizzo teamup movie, or a Pink Ladies movie. Imagine the entertainment.
Ooooh, pitch a Pink Ladies movie to Greta Gerwig or Kate McKinnon!
Rizzo/Channing is the character/performance I appreciate more as time goes on. As a kid, I always skipped past her ballad on tape, but as time goes on, she gets the meatiest stuff in the movie and she crushes it.
Speaking of Stockard Channing, can I just gush about how unbelievably fine she looked in the finale? The red shirt, pink shorts, and heels. You know the outfit I’m talking about.
I thought it was a ridiculous oversight not to mention Channing. She stole a number of scenes herself.
This was the first thing I saw Stockard Channing in (I was only 8) and I adored her and would watch anything she was in. I still love her and thought she was perfect in The Good Wife.My sister and I watched that movie so much. One weekend we spent at my cousin’s house and my cousin told us the next morning that she had to go sleep on the couch because my sister was singing the songs in her sleep.
Panchakarma:-Panchakarma is a major purification and alcohol treatment in Ayurveda. Panchakarma means a combination of five different therapies. This process is used to cleanse the body from the toxins released by the wrong diet, such as excessive substance abuse, etc.Ayurveda states that imbalanced dosha produces waste material. Panchakarma is a process, it is a part of a group of therapies related to purification procedures called ‘Shodhan’. Panchakarma has five therapies ‘vomit, purgation, nerves, vasti and blood pressure’. At the time of balancing the doshas, this series of five therapies helps to remove deep-based stress and disease causing organisms inside the body.It brings back balance in our doshas and cleanses the toxins from the body through the excretory glands, urethra, intestines, etc. Panchakarma is thus a balanced practice, which improves our mental and physical system.(*shuddhi nasha mukti evam punarvas kendra“Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous” and Yoga, Meditation, Psychological Treatment, Group Therapy, placing the addicts of any kind of addiction in our center in a loving environment The program created by combining Panchakarma and medical treatment provides complete relief from intoxication. With the help of America’s “Alcoholics Anonymus and Narcotics Anonymous” program, more than five million people in the world have overcome drug addiction. This is the most effective program for de-addiction. This creates a sense of acceptance of the problem of the person suffering from the drug and their family due to them and when he accepts that he is an alcoholic or an addict and then begins to improve. Through this, the victim gets to know why he is not able to control the addiction because what he and the society considers bad addiction is a disease, not addiction. Which is also proven by the research of “American Medical Association”. Named “Addictive Personality Disorder”
that section about the roots of 50’s nostalgia is really fascinating, and i think you’ve found the seed for the 60’s hippies becoming 80’s yuppies – ShaNaNa performing at Woodstock, right before Jimi. Guess thats why Johnny Rotten used to sneer about “never trust a hippie” – he cold sniff the Reagan-voter hiden within….
Johnny Rotten has become a Trump and Brexit shill, so there’s that.Although it’s also true that a major part of the Grateful Dead fanbase was BMW driving Anne Coulter and Tucker Carlson types.
I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac.
A little voice inside my head said “Don’t look back. You can never look back.”
Isn’t Rage Against the Machine Paul Ryan’s favorite band? Man a lot of shitty people have great taste in music.
Great taste without the irony and self-awareness.
He’s the one
Who like all our pretty songs
And he likes to sing along
And he likes to shoot his gun
But he don’t know what it means
Don’t know what it means
i always thought of the ramones as a louder ShaNaNa
Sniff it within himself considering that Rotten is now a far-right winger who wears MAGA clothes and is anti-abortion.
Wasn’t “Bodies” already an anti-abortion song?
What really jumped out at me was the reference to Animal House being made in 1978 but set in 1962 because in 2020 it seems bizarre to be nostalgic for the culture of 16 years ago. What would a movie set in 2002 even mine for nostalgia, references to Smashmouth and CRT monitors everywhere? How different must the late 70’s have been from the early 60’s for people to feel this kind of nostalgia for a period so recent in their cultural memory?
Sorry to be the killjoy but Halloween was the film with the greater impact and larger cultural relevance. You said it in the write up, it spawned a genre that is still bearing fruit in 2020. Not just the Halloween films but Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream and too many others to list. It created a new term “Scream Queen” and more importantly it showed that women could be the hero in the story and not rely on a man to save them. Also Grease gave us Grease 2. You really want that to be your legacy even though it did introduce us to Michelle Pfieffer.
yeah, summer of 78 was Grease in North America, but in the UK it was the summer that Punk really became popular. Grease was a giant hit over here, and “You’re the one that I want” was our number 1 for weeks (unusual in the UK, where songs topped the charts for 1 or 2 weeks only), but it was displaced by the Boomtown Rats, and it felt like the changing the guard. Didn’t hurt that when they performed on Top of the Pops as the new #1, they did this!
I love Rat Trap far more than the near-ubiquitous I Don’t Like Mondays.
1978 was also probably the last year that really appalling 1950s pastiche bands like Showaddywaddy were regulars in the UK Top Ten.
Shakin’ Stevens showed up in the early 80s though.
Sad, but true.
Alvin Stardust the Poundshop Presley.
The successor to Shane Fenton the Poundshop Buddy Holly.
I wish I could find the clip of John Noakes trying to say “Showaddywaddy” on an episode of Blue Peter. Fair play to the band, they thought it was funny too.
The Boomtown Rats!!!!I listened to the shit out of The Fine Art of Surfacing in HS (admittedly because I loved I Don’t Like Mondays).
They could’ve been huge, if only their lead singer were more charismatic.Seriously, though, watching that video I can’t help feeling like Bob Geldof is about to travel through time and space to seduce me. That’s some stage presence.
Be careful. Tends to end badly for people he seduces.
The drummer looks like Donald Trump (from far away, anyway).
He shows his love by putting on a sweater for ten minutes, she shows her love by becoming a slut. Classic.
Shouldn’t you be at the March for Life today?
I’m going. But first I gotta stop by Walmart and pick up a bunch of hangers.
And remember, girls, if you want a guy you’ve got to completely transform yourself into what HE wants. I thought the ending was gross, too.
Thank Christ somebody gets what I was saying.
I agree it’s pretty gross but Sandy in no way became a slut.
Yeah because it’s supposed to function as an instruction manual for how people should act. Genius take.
I think that would depend on whether he was condemning the character or the movie’s message.
You were on your way to making a reasonable point there, but not only did you not stick the landing, you’ve demolished the vaulting horse.
The skill of gymnastics, the kill of karate!
Karate, the Dane Cook of martial arts!
I mean everyone knows the vaulting horse was just asking for it.
Are you seriously slut-shaming Olivia Newton-John?
I think he’s talking about Sandy, not ON-J.I’m not really a fan of that ending, either. There’s a lot that conceptually make sense to me, but hit a roadblock when I think of them being practically applied to, say, my daughters. If one of them started completely changing her attitude and dress for a guy, I’d admit I wouldn’t be terribly thrilled with that.
Depends on where you fall on is Sandy changing for a guy or was Sandy always repressing herself and is exaggerating at the end to make a point?
I’m not looking for too much depth in character development here, but imagine watching the movie for the first time all the way up until the end of the big race. Nothing in those first 95% of the movie did they hint at Sandy leaning towards and repressing Leather Sandy. I think the more obvious reading is that it’s all done for Danny. There are no scenes hinting that she really wants to wear leather pants, but her strict parents or whatever won’t let her.
How did she become a slut? She put on tight pants? OH THE HORROR! Thank god you’re impotent.
I have no idea why you’re so pissy about this. Have a Snickers or something
Awww that was so cute! You’re too dumb to think of your own replies so you have to use mine! I’m flattered!🙏🏻
You’re just mad because no one cared what you had to say as a teenager and no one gives a shit now.
LOL yeah you real dumb.
End your life.
But I’ve got tickets to Progressive on Ice for next week.
I hope it’s Flo and not her understudy. Understudy trips more than Gerald Ford.
I’m going for Jamie. That guy is a hoot.
I hear he molests Collies.
I heard he hangs dong.
I love ‘Sixteen Candles.’ John Hughes was a genius.
I love Candlejack. He’s so
You’re both fucking losers.
Get crazy with the Cheez Whiz.
Mad #209, March ’79
I just want to admit here and now, that as a 50 year old man… Sha Na Na was my very first concert. I loved them on TV, so my parents took me.
My girlfriend made me go to see The Bay City Rollers (I’m English, and I am also very, very old).
Did that concert happen to be on… S! A! T-U-R! D-A-Y! NIGHT?
My first gig as Alvin Stardust, to my shame. I was about 11 and thought it very creepy a load of girls were screaming over a middle aged man dressed in leather.
Aye, I’m 51 and the parents watched Sha Na Na’s TV show every week and loved it, no doubt having flashbacks to youth.
Good night, and grease for peace!
I never understood the sneering of the rock purists, who seem to regard Sha Na Na as a virus that infected their precious Woodstock. In the film, they seem to be the only group not acting insufferably self-important. They just looked like they were having fun.
If it’s any consolation, Woodstock alum Keith Moon of the Who was a big Sha Na Na fan and would emcee some of their concerts – in drag.
You’re 4 years older than me, but I fucking LOVED Sha Na Na as well. I have vivid memories of watching that show as a kid, and to be honest I loved the whole retro 50’s wave back then. Happy Day’s, 50’s revival rock artists being played again…loved it SO much.
In ‘92 I met two members of Sha Na Na and neither one was Bowser. What bullshit.
Seeing as how Bowser is the only recognizable member, are you sure you didn’t meet two, y’know, guys?
I loved Bowzer.
Weirdly this isn’t showing up at https://www.avclub.com/c/the-popcorn-champs
‘Grease’ wasn’t just a bad film, it was repellent. Every single character was dislikeable. I’m reminded of a comic Henry James short story where a struggling writer can’t find success because he cannot bring himself to write BADLY enough to please the general public.
One thing I just thought of, when people get or create an opportunity that may initially have been denied them, sometimes it’s amazing what they can do.John Travolta, drops out of high school – ultimately becomes a fully qualified commercial jet pilot among other things.
He wasn’t just a nobody drop-out, though – the school he left was Dwight-Morrow, as in Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s family, and he left to pursue fame and fortune, which he evidently found.
I’m really surprised we haven’t yet gotten a horribly misguided “woke” update of You’re the One That I Want like John Legend’s Baby It’s Cold Outside.
I couldn’t believe how terrible Legend’s version was (“your body and your choice” may as well put a date stamp on it). The funny part is the woman is still flashing every signal that she’s ready to be seduced and he’s like “OK, off you go! There’s the driver! Out!”
Without him, it would be entirely unwatchable.Is “unwatchable” becoming overused in discussions about films? I see it being thrown around a lot on forums, as expected from the histrionics and fannish exaggeration you’d find there. But in professional pieces? It stands out to me here because of the headline and that it had just been used in the previous paragraph to describe Toomorrow when it popped up again to describe Grease.Travolta is clearly the main draw (and had much more production input than I was aware of), but would this movie really be so bad that you couldn’t watch it, assuming it was exactly the same except for his absence? I think Newton-John, Channing, Conaway all turn in fun, fine performances, and the film itself looks great- the choreography in the funhouse during “You’re The One That I Want” is inventive and iconic (the dancing in the whole movie is, really). As pointed out, Grease already existed as a successful property before the film and Travolta’s involvement. Travolta’s charisma certainly bumps it all up to something worthy of a craze, but I think what’s around him is a far cry from bad, let alone unwatchable.
Doesn’t matter that Grease was a proven property nor that it was stacked from to back with working pros. If you don’t have a matinee idol who can also realistically pull off all the singing and dancing in the movie, it’s toast.Now, if you can point out a contemporary of Travolta’s at the time with his level of looks, fame and talent, they might have been able to make Grease work as well he did, then sure, he’s not quite as essential. But I’m struggling to think who could replace him and still carry that movie.
Richard Gere played Danny on Broadway, so I’m led to believe. Maybe he could have done watch Travolta did just as effectively?
edit: From a comment further below, it seems it was London (West End?) where he played Danny.
There’s a big difference between saying that Grease wouldn’t have been as big a hit and become a huge cultural force without Travolta and saying that it would have been unwatchable without Travolta. The former is defensible, the latter is not.
Grease with Richard Gere as Danny Zuko would be almost a textbook example of unwatchable IMO.
Whether or not that’s true, Gere wasn’t the only other actor in the world. The notion that literally any actor except Travolta would have made Grease unwatchable is silly.
Still can’t come up with an alternative to Travolta, huh?
You’re still acting like the claim is “another actor could have made Grease the same hit/cultural force as Travolta.” No one here is asserting that. The claim is “Grease could still have been watchable without Travola.” If you really think that none of the literally hundreds of thousands of other male actors in the world in 1978 could have made Grease watchable, then… that certainly is an opinion you’re entitled to.
I don’t think that’s what you’re asserting. For me to do that, you’d have to actually pick one of the “hundreds of thousands” alternatives at your disposal first. Until then, this is just wanking.
I really don’t have to. The notion is self-evidently valid. (As others have pointed out, Grease was a successful property before Travolta was ever involved.) The idea that a successful stage musical would be “unwatchable” as a movie except with one specific actor is absurd.
“The idea that a successful stage musical would be “unwatchable” as a movie except with one specific actor is absurd.”Yeah, we know you keep getting stuck on that word. Meanwhile, I’m just over here trying to find examples to buttress your point, and you’re not helping, despite the fact that your problem is with the author and not me.
You said “it’s toast” which sure sounds like you agree with the author. So perhaps that’s the cause of the confusion.
As I keep saying, nerds ruing everything.
Winkler, since danny is essentially a Fonz variant anyway.
Good suggestion. He might be a little short though.
Yah, and who knows if he could sing. Still, the exercise was to pop somebody in the role who could have made it watchable, and Winkler would have.
Stephen Shortridge?
I wonder if Grease without Travolta would be Xanadu?
I’m not getting into all that. There are huge gaps between films that are phenomenons and smashes and hits and fine and bad and unwatchable.Grease without Travolta is nowhere near the bottom of that scale.
I think you logged into the wrong account there, bub.
Nah, I’m good.
It’s a weird take, particularly given that they did make a sequel without him, and while it wasn’t good, it was watchable (not to mention the fact that the musical had been on stage without him in the lead for quite a while before the movie came out).I definitely don’t think the movie would’ve been this big a hit without him, though.
Exactly. It probably would not have been such a hit, but it probably would’ve worked well enough as an entertaining, watchable film. I feel like I’m being nitpicky and semantic, but the article predicated itself on this point. It doesn’t take for me.
Yah, that made me mentally swamp him out with Henry Winkler…and it would have still been watchable.
Agreed. I thought the author put way too much emphasis on Travolta. That’s his opinion. I loved that movie when I was a kid, mostly for the women in the cast. Travolta didn’t even register for me.
Completely agreed, and I’m not even much of a Grease fan. I was glad they gave the vastly underrated Broadway choreographer Patricia Birch, who did the off Broadway and Broadway versions, the role of choreographer for the film as well (especially since they changed so much of the creative team including songwriters of course). Her stuff really shines. She often wasn’t lucky—her one break to direct a film (she had directed musicals on stage) was… Grease 2. But say what you will about that film (and I admit to having a soft spot for it) the dance sequences are really well filmed…
As for other stars—Richard Gere played the lead in the original London production around, I believe, 1975. He wasn’t yet a movie star but I wonder if that would have worked on film.
The high-school students all look old as hellI caught the ending carnival scene a couple months ago when my stepfather was watching it on TV (I think he was just waiting for it to end because he wanted to watch whatever was airing next), and I could not stop laughing at how old all of these “high school students” looked. I know it’s standard Hollywood MO for people in their 20s to play teenagers, but they usually at least look like they could be teenagers.I’ve always viscerally despised this movie. I’m old enough to have lived through the tail end of that first wave of ‘50s nostalgia, and ever since then ‘50s nostalgia has made my skin crawl. And I know it’s just a cheesy musical rom-com and I shouldn’t be putting too much thought into it, but the idea that Sandy, a smart girl who should have a meaningful adult life, is just going to settle for her loser high school boyfriend who’s probably going to work at a gas station, and spend the rest of her life washing his socks and pumping out babies, makes me angry.
Not to be that guy, and I only do this because of hoe well-written and error free your articles usually are , bt“where built around the spectacle of John Travolta shaking his ass” Come on. It’s not like it’s buried in the middle of the article. It was really jarring to read that.
Of course, I rarely proofread and I cannot manage one sentence without a typo, but I am just a lowly comments section poster.
I thought that statement was unnecessarily crude. Are all dancing movies about shaking your ass? Did Fred Astaire shake his ass? John Travolta did a fine job and I think your comment was demeaning.
I think you meant to respond to Breihan as he was the one who said it. And if my bolding was not sufficient, I was quoted it because he used “where” instead of “were”.
The Boy in the Plastic Bubble? Wow. I can’t have even thought about that film for at least 30 years.
Really? It comes up all the time, most notably in a Paul Simon song and Seinfeld episode. Have you been living in some kind of sealed-off artificial environment?
Yes. The UK.To be honest my mind seems to have disconnected the Paul Simon song from the Travolta film (possibly because the Paul Simon video has the boy as a baby?) It probably prompted memory of the film when I first heard the song, but that meets my “at least 30 years” threshold. As for Seinfeld, despite several attempts I still don’t find that show funny, so almost certainly have never seen the episode to which you refer.
The Simon and Seinfeld parts were mainly setup for the joke at the end. And the former’s use is definitely more metaphorical/riffing off the concept as opposed to the movie, I can’t remember if the Seinfeld episode (which is also approaching 30 years yikes) makes specific reference to Travolta..
The Seinfeld episode definitely draws on cultural awareness of the Boy in the Bubble to shorthand the situation, before deftly playing on your expectations when you learn the “Bubble Boy” is now in at least his 20s and a bitter jackass. Who of course knows the Trivial Pursuits deck backwards and forwards.REM has a great (but heartbreaking) song about the character called The Wrong Child, which is a much more direct allusion to the character than Simon’s work.I will try to sing a happy song
I’ll try and make a happy game to play
“Come play with me” I whispered to my newfound friend
Tell me what it’s like to go outside
I’ve never been
Tell me what it’s like to just go outside
I’ve never been
And I never willI’m not supposed to be like this
I’m not supposed to be like this, but it’s okay
Wow – that REM song is another 30+ year echo for me.But this exchange is not convincing me I’ve made a mistake not getting into Seinfeld.
I’d completely forgotten about the song because when Green came out I was still about rocking it out and mostly skipped it. I downloaded the remaster/reissue of Green a couple of years ago and it resonates much more today.Seinfeld’s gotten heat in recent years over its characters being selfish and unlikable, but I think that’s overshooting the mark. They’re New Yorkers, they take care of themselves first. But the show will make you cry from laughing.
I’ve watched a few episodes that have supposedly been ranked amongst the best and barely raised a smirk. I have however watched quite a lot of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, mainly ones where I’m a fan of the guest, and the impression I get from that is that it must have been no stretch for Seinfeld to play a selfish and unlikable character.
Fun fact: When he finally did get to leave his bubble (briefly, wearing a germ-proof suit designed by NASA), he had a very hard time understanding how the world was laid out. He spent his entire life in a single room, so he couldn’t conceptualize the relationships between spaces – like the idea that his house had both a front and a back.
jesus, that’s about as fun as I’d expect a fact about a kid trapped inside for his entire life to be.
The Boy in the Bubble really isn’t directly referenced in the Seinfeld Bubble Boy episode, though. I was aware of the latter long before I was of the former.
I often bring it up when teaching immunology and talking about David Vetter, the real “boy in the bubble” (who didn’t live to the age of Travolta’s character, unfortunately)
I can remember watching that on re-runs in the old antenna TV days, and recently re-visiting it watching Rifftrax. It’s a LOT better with Rifftrax added…
Actually just saw a Rifftrax version of it on Pluto TV recently.
The Rifftrax version (often on Pluto or Amazon Prime) is well worth the watch.
Decade nostalgia is almost always a rose-colored look back, no matter the decade. The term “the Gay 90s” probably wasn’t meant to evoke memories of Gilded Age labour strikes, or anarchist politocal assassinations, but rather the care-free salad days of a certain demographic’s youth. Likewise, the 50s nostalgia of the 70s wasn’t going to remind people about the Korean War, the last Red Scare or McCarthyism, but rather the youth- oriented popular entertainment of the day.The cycle will endlessly continue. 70s nostalgia, despite that decade being absolutely crummy by many objective standards, was a real thing when I was a teenager in the 90s. I can probably predict that 20 years from now, the Taliban-style beard that just now seems to be fading away will probably make a nostalgic comeback as a new generation starts to fondly remember the 2010s.
I mean, the 1890’s really were a better time if you were speaking between 1914 and 1950.
One could also make the same argument about the 50s (at least the late 50s) from a 70s point of view, considering the contemporary stagflation, oil shock energy crises, Watergate, the end of the Vietnam war, the growth of the rust belt and related de-industrialization. And the whole hang-over from the late 60s, early 79s.
See also the Edwardian period. A lot of works prior to the 1970s were set in the first decade of the 20th century (Lady and the Tramp, Mary Poppins, The Music Man) because the time right before WWI was viewed as the best time that existed.
Indeed. The ‘60s was really packed with Edwardian/WWI nostalgia movies. Perhaps alongside the customary 20-year nostalgia epicycle, there’s a 50-year one, as the memories of contemporaries start to dim or die off.
The Korean War wasn’t nearly as bad as Vietnam. I think the 50s are remembered as a time of peace and prosperity because, generally speaking, that was actually the case.
What was actually the case was significant nationwide economic growth in the 1950s, which started slowing down in the 1960s. But there was plenty of cultural strife even then, it’s just been excised in the rosy nostalgia. Ask black folks how great the 1950s were.
I’m a person of color and do find myself rolling my eyes quite a bit whenever I see movies/tv set nostagically in the 1950s with care-free teens in their poodle skirts, going steady and hanging out at maltshops. Everything is typically made to look cute and charmingly Americana because they’re not acknowledging how others lived less cute lives racial segregation.
I was under the impression that the post-war economic boom really ended in the seventies, but it could be that the sixties were slower relative to the fifties.
I confess my understanding of historical economic trends is not great. I looked at a chart of US GDP growth by year and most years after 1945 have had positive growth, but it looked like there were more years with higher values in the early 1950s than in the 1960s or later. But of course there’s lots of other metrics one could look at, too: CPI, spending power per capita, etc.
Yeah, inflation gets higher in the sixties, and then in the seventies you get the unexpected combination of high unemployment with high inflation dubbed “stagflation”, and then by the early eighties a majority of voters are saying it’s the biggest problem facing the country. That’s strange to think about in the current perspective, but it helps explain why so many older people at the Federal Reserve are stuck fighting that successful war against inflation. They came of age at a time where the foolish older folks in charge only remembered insufficient stimulus as the big macroeconomic problem.
* depending on your race
Depends on the perspective. Vietnam was longer, but it was a much lower intensity war than Korea.
The total number of Americans killed was higher in Vietnam, but I suppose you’re right that per year it would be a lower number, particularly if we started counting before the Gulf of Tonkin incident.Another reason for the difference is that the Vietnam war ultimately ended in defeat, which made it impossible to be remembered like WW2 as something costly but worthwhile.
Also, the time when the American Empire was at it’s apex. After that, it’s all really bad wars, institutional failures across the board, and increasing partisanship. MAGA is centered around the belief that things were better way back when and way back when means before everything got supercomplicated in the world and country (oh, and minorities got a whole lot more rights)
While it’s probably true, never say that to a Korean war vet (well, the few that are left at least). My dad left an ass cheek in Korea and based on his accounts it was a living hell.
If you were white and straight.
My personal hope is that the awareness of revisionist nostalgia spreads, successive generations will be able to put the kibosh on that kind of thing. I don’t think people were as nostalgic for the ‘90s in the ‘10s as they were for the ‘70s in the ‘90s, and I’m saying this as a kid who came of age in the ‘90s.
90s nostalgia is a real thing. The Spin Doctors were allowed back on the radio, for crying out loud. Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis compilations or retro consoles have been wildly successful. Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur are still getting referenced as though they just died last year. And of course relitigating the Clinton Presidency is a thing Republicans have been doing for the past 5 years…
The 90’s were a weird decade in which there was no cohesive, cultural narrative to it. -60’s: Vietnam, protests, and the Boomers come of ageThe 70’s: post hippie idealism gone sour and then disco and punk. 80’s: ReaganismThe 90’s? Dunno.From a cultural standpoint, the only that’s really lasted or made any sort of impact was grunge and most people just remember the music and flannel shirts than any sort of philosophy or ideas surrounding it.I’ve always thought that the 90’s emphasis on “authenticity,” “not selling out” and avoidance of cheesiness limited any sort of noticeable cultural signifiers like disco or hippy culture or mullets. Other than flannel shirts, there’s’ nothing too compelling about the decade to make it stick.
The 90s is neatly bookended by the cold war ending, and the Global War on Terror.
The 70’s has this dichotomy in that a LOT of it was terrible but there was also incredible film, cinema and art in general going on. But you’re right in that nostalgia plays a huge part.As a kid I can remember the “Disco Sucks!” wave very vividly in the late 70’s and early 80’s. But come the 90’s when I was in college the 70’s were back big time.
I kind of wish there’d be more 70’s comebacks because it’s an endlessly ridiculous and bonkers decade. That being said, for whatever reason, we can’t get rid of the 80’s as it always seems to be lurking somewhere out there
I agree. As today’s column states:’50s-revival movies and TV shows of the ’70s … [didn’t] attempt to reckon with the bad things about the ’50s—Jim Crow laws, McCarthy hearings, widespread repression.And why would they? Those were the concerns of the adults during the 50s. (Also, don’t forget about the Cold War and the awareness that any time, the whole world could be blasted into a radioactive oblivion.)
This. Decade nostalgia seems to be driven by young and middle aged adults fondly remembering the culture of their childhood and teenage years. The serious concerns of the adult world at the time would have been mostly invisible to them. Ask me how much the market crash of ‘87 affected 11 year old me, vs. the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Is this true for anyone else? I was born in 1979. “Saturday Night Fever” was etched in my mind growing up as this upbeat, underdog story about a guy who dances his way to a better life. Plus, I liked the soundtrack.I finally gave the uncensored version a spin when I was about 30 and holy shit. I was not ready for the racism, rape, drugs and overall griminess of it. I’m not saying it was bad, far from it, but it was really jarring given what I expected going in.
Definately true. See my comment below.Someone last week noted that few films with as strong a cultural impact as Saturday Night Fever are so different from their popular perception.
I would argue that Rocky and First Blood are also like that in that people who grew up with the cheesy sequels don’t realize that the original movies are serious movies about boxing and PTSD. Stallone basically went from being a potentially great dramatic actor to basically just being the forerunner of Arnie S and The Rock.
It’s weird that Stallone directed the sequel, Staying Alive, and while he did make the same “70s movie to 80s movie” shift for Saturday Night Live as he was making for Rocky and Rambo (instead of just surviving and learning a valuable lesson, Staying Alive ends with Tony becoming a Broadway star), he doesn’t sand the rough edges off Tony the way he did off Rambo and Rocky. Tony’s still a selfish, misogynistic pig in Staying Alive, maybe more so than he was in SNF.
Yeah, in Fever, Tony’s more an anti-hero, or possibly a Byronic hero. He acts out because he knows his life is superficial and he has no future. Staying Alive, he’s straight up the villain of the movie; a full-on sociopath who doesn’t care about anything but himself and is rewarded even though he doesn’t deserve it.
I just had to chime in about Rocky. My husband and I watched all the best pictures from the first to the most recent over a many year run. (SPOILER AHEAD) Anyway, we got to Rocky and I was all, wait. He loses? I was so surprised at the film. I was only 5 or 6 when it came out so I remembered the later Rockys.
The same is true for Saturday Night Fever. After it was over, I commented, “Well, that really wasn’t about disco, was it?” I was shocked by the film. It was so unexpected.
And then Sly Stallone pulls a Rock and Rambo (sequels) and writes and directs Stayin’ Alive, with his brother being more prominently placed on the soundtrack than the Beegees. Sigh.
Exactly, it’s like the idiots that use Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” as a patriotic mantra. They hear/see what they want and miss absolutely everything else that it is really about.
I finally gave the uncensored version a spin when I was about 30 and holy shit. I was not ready for the racism, rape, drugs and overall griminess of it. I’m not saying it was bad, far from it, but it was really jarring given what I expected going in. This. It’s pretty much the closets we’ll get to a Last Exit to Brooklyn film as it was way moreso than the actual one that got filmed. Even that whole disco contest that so revered by pop culture was insanely racist as one of his main motivations for doing it was to upstage the black and latin contestants. It doesn’t help either that it was based off of a story by Nik Cohn, a British pop-music journo who knew nothing about New York and would later plead guilty to heroin trafficking and later admitted that he made up whole thing up.
There are always some complaints I hear about them not showing any gays at the disco. And I think that plays into the point…
As I said elsewhere, I do suspect some people grew up on the PG edited version which got a theatrical re-release which probably helps with the nostalgia…
Yep totally. The soundtrack and censored version that I saw bits of on UK telly misled me into thinking the film was generally upbeat and as fun as Grease.
When you see the uncensored version, boy is it a shock.
I wish you could get the PG version they released in theaters. I very much prefer it, because it skips over most of the depressing shit.
Never knew they had an uncensored version.
It’s shocking how deep Saturday Night Fever penetrated into the culture given that it feels like a hard-R movie. I saw it, in theaters, when I was in second grade, and it doesn’t seem like I was the only one, since kids at school talked about it the way grade schoolers today talk about MCU movies (or Frozen—everyone could imitate Saturday Night Fever’s dances and knew the songs).But man, that’s a lot of rape and suicide for a kids movie…
I am around the same age as you. I didn’t know anyone who saw SNF in the theaters, but of course the soundtrack was everywhere. I also owned the parody album Sesame Street Fever.
We had the Mickey Mouse disco album. It was absolutely awful.
I had the Disney disco album (I cannot remember the name of it) with Disco Duck sang to the tune of Macho Man. “Disco, disco du-uck”
I had something similar when I read the original Sherlock Holmes stories. You think as a kid “Oh, fun old timey detective in London” but then you’re like “Wait, he injects cocaine?? The fuck?!”
My mom took my friend and I to see it in the theater when we were 11 – honestly, only the music and dancing stuck with me. The rest of it went right over my head. Not long after that, my dad took me to see Animal House. He had already seen it, and wanted to see it again so badly that he took his twelve year old daughter along. Not entirely appropriate, but I loved that movie so much, and by that time I was a lot more savvy.
absolutely. i was shocked the first time i saw it. the majority of people i think experienced the wildly edited vh1 version.
What you experienced is also known as The Great Gatsby Syndrome…
I’ve only seen pieces of the movie (mostly the dancing) and I just told my mom about reading this and not realizing that it was such a dark movie and she just nodded her head grimly.
I think Saturday Night Fever — especially in the days of
video stores and over the air rebroadcasts — took on a lot of backwards
shine from Grease, with people lumping them together as Travolta
dance-taculars.Circa 1986 you could just pick up Saturday Night Fever right as a dance scene was starting in a sanitized version on UHF while you were in the middle of channel surfing, or you
could just fast forward through the gritty scenes on a VCR. Grease was
still the sunnier movie, but by the 80s Saturday Night Fever was already
a vehicle for nostalgia, especially if all you saw was Travolta strutting in a white suit.
For a show of how weak the female lead was, her dressing in a manner consistent with another subculture to show she respected and was willing to be seen with someone else’s subculture was taken as her completely overwriting her identity, as her personality prior to that was “wears preppy knitwear.”
I want a sequel to Grease set decades later where Sandy is dying of lung cancer because she started smoking to impress a boy.Dumbass.
And you want the actress who’s been fighting cancer for ten years to play her?
Grease 2 was already a (really terrible) thing. Grease 3: Sandy in Hospice?
Baa-Baa-Baa…. Baa-Babarino……
Grease was so fun and I remember getting exicted for it when it would appear on Channel 7 in NYC on Sunday night’s in the 80’s. It was always a must watch for me and then in the 90’s a group of friends I just met that year would sing Grease songs while I drove around in my car in NYC. I love this column guys, I’m big popcorn Movie guy and can remember where I was when I saw Empire, Raiders, ET as a kid at age 7-9. Those moments stick with you even in your late 40’s like I am now.By the way Jaws is my favorite movie ever and I refuse to read you Column on it because that “fake” Mechanical Shark has given me more nightmares than anything else ever! I’m sure the Jaws article was great though!
Grease, for all its flaws (and there are many) is one of my favorite movies of all time. I disagree with the assessment that Travolta is the only thing that saves it from being unwatchable although he is clearly a highlight. Stockard Channing is the real gem.
Maybe it’s by virtue of her character actually having a personality, but I always had a way bigger crush on Rizzo than Sandy. And dem legs! Mmf!
So you’re hot for 24-year-old Travolta? Understandable, but the takes on “Grease” here are way off. First of all, Olivia Newton-John is who made the movie great, with Travolta in a second slot (would have been third if Stockard Channing had just a slightly larger role).Much of this sounds like the critiques I heard for “Mamma Mia” when it came out, from people trying to jam a fun movie into the paradigm of serious films. It was just a fun movie! (“Grease” and “Mamma Mia”).
i have never understood the appeal of Grease… or john travolta, for that matter. this article kinda puts things in perspective, so thanks!
I was in a high school production of Grease a loooooooong time ago, and even though it took up weeks of my life, the only thing I really remember about it is that the school insisted we cut the whole Greased Lightning number. Which was the right decision. I guess what I am saying is that nothing about Grease has left much of an impression on me.In contrast, a year later we did Little Shop of Horrors and I still remember almost every line from that. I don’t know why one has stuck with me while the other has completely vanished into the ether, but until today I haven’t thought about Grease at all since high school.
I attended a high school performance of Grease last year. They used the high school version which includes Greased Lightning but changes the lyrics.
I remember that we asked to change the lyrics, but my school was so scared that they just made us skip that part altogether. I don’t know if there was a high school version that the school still wasn’t comfortable using or what, but I remember that they said they would cancel it if Greased Lightning was in any way a part of the show. It seems odd, because I would think you could easily change the lyrics and make a version that would be acceptable, but apparently my high school wasn’t on board.
To be fair, even if you change the lyrics it’s still a song about his dick.The car is his dick. It’s also a car, but mostly it’s his dick.
I know there is a high school version school’s can rent or buy the copyrights to. It’s the version all, or almost all, schools use, and has watered down lyrics. My school had the greased lightning scene and added a few of its own. Not sure why a high school would say no to a watered down version. Grease performances guarantee sell outs.
I remember going to see Star Wars. I REMEMBER going to see Grease (I wasn’t allowed to see Saturday Night Fever, probably for good reason). Olivia Newton-John was my 7-year-old crush before I even knew what that meant. The following Christmas my sister received the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and my brother the Grease soundtrack. I think that was the year I got coal because I kicked in the back door and threw our new kittens into the Christmas tree, but that is another story for another time.
That comment certainly took a turn.
What can I say? I was precocious…
Do you mean… purrrcocious?
When Grease opened in London, in the mid-70s, Richard Gere played Danny, and since I lived round the corner from the theatre often saw the cast in my local pub after performances, and Gere was an incredibly striking young man. I was always surprised when Travolta got the role in the film, since Gere seemed perfect for it, but that’s why Stigwood was a multi-millionaire, and I’m not. Toomorrow may have been shelved in the US but got shown elsewhere, and is apparently spectacularly appalling, apparently approaching Menahem Golan’s eye-poppingly terrible The Apple as most ill-conceived and half-assed ‘rock opera / sci-fi / musical’ ever made.
I’d say Travolta had the greaser look down much better than Gere, and was plenty charismatic without being distractingly hansom.
You’re even older than I am … I lived in London from 1970-73, aged 12-15, and I saw that production of Grease. (We the only people in the audience who squealed “Twinkies!” when one of the characters mentions them at lunch.)Also I saw lots of ads for Toomorrow, and had one my first horrible desperate yearning for that girl Olivia. I was amazed when I learned, ages later, who it had been.
Entire Toomorrow film is on YouTube, of course.
Richard Gere has his 70’s moment in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which has sadly been lost to history.
His performance in Breathless was genuinely shocking the first time I saw it – he’s like a sexy, mean Nicolas Cage. I have no idea why he adopted such a subdued acting style after that, but it feels like a real loss.
Surely his ’70s moment is Malick’s Days of Heaven?
Travolta had a hit show and a hit film—there’s the difference. But I think a young Gere woulda been fine on screen. I posted this elsewhere, but here’s Gere in footage of the London Grease.
And bonus points for any mention of The Apple
A pre Rocky Horror Barry Bostwick (!) was the original Danny off-Broadway. Here he is with Carole Demas as Sandy (Adrienne Barbeau, not here, was Rizzo) in the early 80s “recreating” Summer Nights.
And again in 1982 singing Alone at a Drive In Movie (which was replaced for the film by the catchier Sandy)
And for comparison, a pre-Rocky Horror Barry Bostwick (!) opened the show with Carole Demas off-Broadway in New York (Adrienne Barbeau was Rizzo). Here they are in the mid 80s recreating Summer Nights.
And Barry singing Alone at a Drive In Movie (which was replaced in the movie by the catchier Sandy)
Can Richard Gere sing? I don’t think I’ve ever seen him do so.Not that Travolta’s voice was great, but it could have been worse.
Now I want to see Toomorrow (1970). Stupid Streaming services need to up their game.
It was available in the UK in a truly terrible DVD version, the existing elements apparently being in truly crappy shape, and while I don’t think Criterion would be interested, someone like Arrow could do a restoration job on it and satisfy the few dozen people like ourselves who would love to see it. What is so weird about the whole thing is that the director is Val Guest, a very capable British helmer whose first screenplay credit is from 1935 and whose first feature was made back in 1943, and who went on to make such films as The Quatermass Xperiment among a number of interesting and very successful non-horror Hammer movies; the underrated The Day The Earth Caught Fire, the superb thriller Hell Is A City and a segment of the ill-fated 1967 Casino Royale.
I could also see someone like Shout do a version.Plus this sounds likeit would make perfect Rifftrax material.
Thanks for the info BTW. Very interesting.
Next month will you also cover the Dustin Hoffman / Meryl Streep / Michael Roberts drama, Kramer vs Kramer vs Kramer?
Great write-up but one little nitpick: American Graffiti takes place in ‘62, not ‘63. The movie’s tagline is even “Where Were You In ‘62?”I’ve always thought that a key part of Travolta’s movie star charisma is how willing he is to poke fun at himself. “Oh come on, Sandy don’t make me laugh… [forced laughter]” And as someone above points out, the scene where he and Kinickie hug and then immediately whip out their combs to cover the awkwardness. He’s so endearing.Grease is just so much damn fun. I’m shocked that Kleiser was so inexperienced, as one thing I love about the movie is how assured it seems, all those perfectly staged buttons at the end of the musical numbers. As for the aged appearance of the cast, I handwave that away because it’s a memory play. At least the stage version is! (It begins with the supporting cast at their 20 year reunion, singing the alma mater (“As I go travelling down life’s highway/Whatever course my fortunes may foretell…”—you hear it in the background in the movie during the announcements) and reminiscing about the T-Birds and the Pink Ladies (‘just the way we always remembered them!”) which then leads to the TBs and the PLs singing the parody alma mater (“I saw a dead skunk on the highway/And I was goin’ crazy from the smell/Cause when the wind was blowin’ my way/It smelled just like the halls of old Rydell”).)And yes, Stockard Channing is great, in pretty much every scene. LOVE There Are Worse Things. She’s not a great singer but she acts the shit out of that song. All the Pink Ladies are terrific.I remember seeing Grease when I was 10 and trying to puzzle out Danny’s line “we didn’t go together, we just went together.” I finally asked my Mom “he means they didn’t date, they just had sex, right?” My Mom (patiently) “Yes, dear.”
While I do love a ton of 50’s themed nostalgia (despite not being even close to old enough to have lived through it) I can’t help but think it set our country back for decades. A bunch of Boomers took it to the extreme and it resulted in Reagan and Trump, and the mess we have today. We just look backwards instead of forwards. I’m sure every era does it, even the 50’s probably had some pining for the 20’s and 30’s. But it just seems so much worse now. And Grease the film is fun at times, but much grosser than I remember it being as a kid. Plus everyone is in their 30’s and playing teenagers.
The boomers in 1980 were younger than the Millenials were in 2016. Trump is on you. And everything bad that happens for the next 35 years is also the millenials fault.
Ah, Grease, the movie I saw at least a dozen times in middle school because our Music teacher was too stressed to actually teach and would just pop in a VHS recording of it that somebody taped off TV. I have not watched it since.
My daughter is six and wanted to watch Grease at her birthday party, but one of the moms said her kid couldn’t watch it because it “features abortion.”I mean, jeez louise, lady.
Huh? Who got an abortion? I know Rizzo thought she was pregnant, but she wasn’t. Are you sure she wasn’t thinking of Dirty Dancing?
They mention abortion. Those people are so awful.
I don’t even remember that being mentioned, and I’ve easily seen it 20 times in my life.
Best number from the movie. Fight me.
That’s the one that occasionally gets stuck in my head. Out of nowhere, I’ll be doing something and all of a sudden Frankie Avalon singing “Beauty school dropout / Go back to high school” pops into my head. I don’t remember the rest of the song, but good lord is that line durable.
That’s your guardian angel singing in your ear…
Stockard Channing FTW.
Ah yes. I remember my big sister playing that one off the soundtrack album incessantly.
Grease sucks in every iteration. I’m a Chicago actor and aware of its place in the gritty, DIY pantheon of Chicago theater, but, it absolutely sucks.
When future generations look at Travolta’s career, they will have a lot of problems explaining its trajectory. The guy was twice the coolest actor in Hollywood, and both times were over in what feels a record time. Good enough to get to the top, not good enough to stay there.
Grease is just one of those movies where, in the technical/screenplay side of the things, is far from one of the best musicals, but in terms of being just plain fun and engaging, it’s up there. And say what you will about Travolta at his low career points, or, uh, now, but at his peaks, that man was a STAR in every sense of the word, and this performance goes towards the top of the heap. It’s like Clooney and Pitt in Ocean’s 11, the movie doesn’t ask them of anything more than be the star wattage, and they make it look easy.“Sandy, you can’t just walk out of a drive-in!”
How the Hades could your miss acknowledging “Superman: The Motion Picture” (which, according to IMDb, was actually the second highest grosser of 1978)?
“Did you want ‘M’, Mr. Luthor?”“‘M’ as in ‘moron’? Oh, no, Otis. ‘N’, as in ‘nitwit’, as in ‘numbskull’, as in ‘nincompoop’ and ‘L’ as in ‘ladder’!”
“Otisburg?!”
“Would you like to see a long arm? Would you like to see a very long arm?”(That was always my favorite)
LEX: Ah! Superman! Welcome! Otis, take his cape.
SUPERMAN: (glares)
OTIS: I…don’t think he wants me to, Mr. Luthor.
Because he already wrote about it in his superhero column, almost exactly two years ago.
https://www.avclub.com/it-s-a-bird-it-s-a-plane-it-s-superman-the-first-1821784629
I’d suggest it deserved at least a mention and a link.
Absolutely. Not least because it’s a great review.
According to The Numbers, it was only Number 11. https://www.the-numbers.com/market/1978/top-grossing-moviesIMDb must be counting its overall gross and not its 1978 gross.
Not the best metric since “Superman” on December 15 of that year.
Fun story: when I was a kid we watched Grease a lot. I was also raised in a very Catholic household in a very Catholic suburb. So whenever I saw the scene when Rizzo and Kenickie are gonna bone in the back of the car only for him to realize the condom was broken, I always thought it was a ring that he pulled out of his wallet. Meaning I thought he was gonna propose to her, therefore making it ok for them to have sex.Like I said, very Catholic household.
Travolta’s star-wattage aside, can we lay it flat out and say the man can’t sing?
Dance, yes. Act, yes (even if he’s a total ham). But “Let Her In” is far from his most putrid performance. His voice across the entire Grease soundtrack is so shrill and off-key, it’s hard to listen to.
“I got CHEEE-YULS they’re MULTIPLY-YAN!” Sounds like someone took a vice grip to his nuts.
Yeah…”Watchable”…
Obligatory Every Movie Featured In These Articles Ranked From Best To Worst Post: The Godfather (1972)2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)The Exorcist (1973)Jaws (1975)Blazing Saddles (1974)Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)Rocky (1976)The Graduate (1967)West Side Story (1961)Spartacus (1960)The Longest Day (1962)Billy Jack (1971)My Fair Lady (1964)Cleopatra (1963)The Sound Of Music (1965)Grease (1978)The Bible: In The Beginning… (1966)Love Story (1970)
Obligatory Top 10 Highest Grossing Movies Of 1978 Post: 1 Grease, Paramount Pictures, $153,097,492 2 National Lampoon’s Animal House, Universal, $141,600,0003 Jaws 2, Universal, $102,922,376 4 Heaven Can Wait, Paramount Pictures, $98,800,000 5 Every Which Way B, Warner Bros., $82,672,336 6 Hooper, Warner Bros., $51,290,536 7 Halloween, Compass International Pictures, $47,000,0008 Convoy, United Artists, $45,000,0009 California Suite, Columbia, $42,913,57110 Up in Smoke, Paramount Pictures, $41,590,893
Where’s Superman?
It was Number 11.
This is the stupidest thing I’ve seen all week and I can’t stop laughing at it.
Thanks. I forget what exactly I made it for, it it makes me giggle every time, too, so I knew it had to be deployed here.
The MAD magazine send-up of Grease was one of the all-time great bits of 1970s satire ever. “The way to land the guy of your dreams…is to become a SLUT!”. Oh it was so epic. God did I hate Grease so, so much. My sister had the soundtrack album and played it daily for at least a solid year.
—the second-biggest album of 1978, behind the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack—Do music sales not follow the same rule as movies, where a film’s box office counts towards its ranking only with regards to the year of release? (Best example: “American Sniper,” the top movie domestically of 2014 despite it making all but $1.3M of its $350M gross in 2015.)
I forgot to mention one of my favorite scenes in the movie – it’s toward the end of this clip. The principal gives the schmaltzy graduation speech, and when she says you will always have the glorious memories of Rydell High, Marty initially reacts as if it’s complete corn, but then at the end, can’t help getting caught up in the emotions. It’s one of those little moments that nicks at you, beautifully played by Dinah Manoff.
I was 14 when “Saturday Night Fever” was released, and I can guarantee you nobody was talking about it being dark and depressing. All you heard about it was that the soundtrack and the dancing were great. I didn’t watch it for the first time until probably twenty years later and was astonished to see what a sleazy weasel the main character was! Back in the day it didn’t even register with most people. Vinnie Barbarino was dancing!
He overplays everything…And pretty much has ever since…
It’s still shocking (in an “inexorable march of time” way) that if someone were wanting to make a nostalgia-centered movie with the same time frame between “Grease” and its setting, this new movie would be set around the year 2000.