Brash young punk from the city moves to conservative small town. Offends the town by doing such scandalous things as listening to loud music, driving a VW bug, and dancing. Town responds with harsh measures such as calling him queer for wearing a tie and kicking him off the high school gymnastics team (!?!?!?). Our hero blows off steam by playing music, dancing, and doing a gymnastics routine through an abandoned factory. Other ridiculous things happen and the end result is they have a prom in the town next over.
If that sounds absurd, the actual movie is ten times more WTF. Was it received as some sort of big joke, or should I just chalk it up to being the 80s?
The real town, which loosely inspired the movie, only dropped its ban on dancing in 1980. Otherwise, I can’t say how the movie was received as my experience was biased by my babysitter at the time.
Her name was Louise, and that summer you would have thought Kenny Loggins was singing to her personally the way she reacted (I didn’t actually see the movie until many years later).
We liked it in my crowd. Of course, we were enjoying the proliferation, these days, of this obscene rock and roll music, with its gospel of easy sexuality and relaxed morality
I assume that you’re referring to the 1984 original film, and not the stage musical or the remake scheduled for release later this year. In any case, the film was really popular at the time. The bit I found most amusing was how skilled all of the kids were at dancing, considering the town-wide ban on dancing.
I remember getting the impression(where, I don’t know) that Ren(Bacon) was teaching them in secret.
Still doesn’t explain the very high competence but it’s something.
Seriously though, any more odd than its contempories?
[ul]
[li]The Big Chill (1983)[/li][li]Flashdance (1983)[/li][li]Footloose (1984)[/li][li]Breakfast Club (1984)[/li][li]St. Elmo’s Fire (1985)[/li][li]Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)[/li][li]Dirty Dancing (1987)[/li][/ul]
I think it should be remembered that Hollywood movies often bear only the most scant relation to reality. Movies are created with the idea in mind of manipulating their audiences’ emotions, so real life goes out the window and whatever advances the story the movie wants to tell comes in. It doesn’t matter a whit whether some little town allowed dancing in reality or not, all that matters is that the movie sets it up that way to provide a setting against which young people can rebel and prevail.
Why single out that eighties? How often do you see a musical comedy that makes sense? Did 42nd Street or Guys and Dolls or Singin’ in the Rain or Top Hat have a good story?
What about it seems absurd to you? It’s certainly not a documentary, but as someone who was a teenager in the Bible belt in the 80’s it didn’t seem terribly far-fetched to me at the time. The first girl I asked to my junior high prom had to turn me down because her religious parents forbid her to dance. And being identified as a queer certainly would set you up for all sorts of harassment.
Ren teaches his friend how to dance in secret but he doesn’t teach everyone in the school. The beginning of the movie shows that the teens are used to heading off to an area on the county border to listen and dance to bootleg tapes.
It made $80 million domestically on an $8 million budget. Die Hard made $83 million domestically (and yeah I looked those up, I don’t have a lot of footloose facts in my brain ready to fire).
Apparently there is also a remake coming out in October.
