Does anyone else remember the original “Going In Style” (1979), with George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasburg? It was a really funny movie in which three old men become bank robbers.
It got its share of air time on 1980’s television; it was actually a big family favorite. I’d been looking around for information about it for years (because movie trivia keeps me up at night), but I remembered the title wrong — I kept thinking of “The Sunshine Boys” (1975), which was a different George Burns movie entirely.
They actually remade the movie 2017 with Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Alan Arkin.
Weird world — Laura Branigan wasn’t the first vocalist to perform her signature song, “Gloria” (1982). It was originally an Italian pop song performed in 1979 by Umberto Tozzi. (That’s the second video below.)
Anyway, for a lot of people in my age bracket, this remains a quintessential 80’s tune. Branigan even performed it in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade the year it was released. I still remember people commenting about how beautiful she looked.
If you’re wondering whatever happened to Branigan, there’s a bit of a sad postscript here — she died in her sleep at a relatively young age, 52, from an undiagnosed brain aneurysm. By that time she’d become a fellow Long Islander; she’d been living in East Quogue.
I, for one, think the Vice President performed remarkably well at last night’s debate — especially right after being harassed by demons at that house in Amityville.
“The Beastmaster” (1982) was THE movie that captured the imaginations of grade-school boys in the 1980’s. There were summer afternoons when this was the single biggest topic of conversation.
I almost wrote here that the movie was an obvious knockoff of the far-better-remembered “Conan the Barbarian;” that is how I’ve always remembered it. But the Internet informs me that they hit theaters only months apart. Wikipedia also informs me that “The Beastmaster” was actually a commercial failure, and that its two sequels and its television adaptation (all in the 1990’s) were aimed at a subsequent cult following spawned by the original movie’s appearance on 80’s TV. (I’m pretty sure that’s how my friends and I saw it.) What the hell was wrong with 1982 audiences, anyway? Was it something in the water? “Blade Runner” and John Carpenter’s “The Thing” were also flops that year — and those were some the best science fiction movies of all time. Talk about pearls before swine.
Anyway, please understand — “Conan the Barbarian” was inarguably the better film. No matter how much it polarized critics and audiences, that dour, violent, R-rated movie was intended as a serious adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s literary source material.
“The Beastmaster,” on the other hand, was campier stuff that was firmly aimed at kids. (I was surprised to learn that it had its own literary source material, but its B-movie wackiness only followed those books very loosely.) It had a PG rating and was jam-packed with garishly grotesque monsters that would thrill a fourth grade boy — the animalistic berzkers were what really got under my skin; my friends were more unnerved by the … bat-people. (There is a simple but quite effective 80’s-era practical effect that show how these baddies digest a victim alive. You kinda have to see the movie to know what I mean.) Hell, even the witches were a little creepy, and witches were not high on our list of things that were scary. I honestly think the film’s success owes a lot to its successful incorporation of horror movie elements designed to impress the younger set.
“The Beastmaster” starred Marc Singer, who went on to star in another 80’s phenomenon, television’s “V” series. (I might have loved “V” even more than “The Beastmaster.”) The movie also starred Tanya Roberts, who was another quite popular topic among gradeschool boys in the 80’s. John Amos starred in a supporting role, and he did a really good job of it. A lot of my older friends will remember him as the grouchy Dad in the “Good Times” (1974-1979); 80’s kids might point him out as the owner of “McDowell’s” in 1988’s “Coming to America.”
I really am curious to find out how well “The Beastmaster” has held up over time. I was surprised to discover that there is a great copy of it here on Youtube. (Thanks, VHS Drive-In.) You can bet that I’m watching it this weekend.
I remember Laser Tag as an exciting but fairly brief blip in 1980’s pop culture. A lot of the kids I knew got excited about these commercials, a lot of us asked earnestly for Laser Tag guns Christmas, and … none of us got them. (Our parents seemed unanimous that they were too expensive.)
Ah, well. The subsequent buzz around my neighborhood was that our parents were probably wise, anyway — we heard later that the guns hardly worked, making the product nowhere near as cool as the commercials depicted. (I am linking below to Kevin Noonan’s Youtube Channel, by the way.)
And then the fad faded — all the hubbub around Laser Tag (and Photon, its cheaper competitor) just kinda went away. It sort of makes sense. Paintball was alive and well as an edgier, more subversive, and more exciting sport; I can’t imagine how these gaudy electronic products could compete with that.
The Wikipedia entry for Laser Tag had a couple of surprises for me. For starters, the technology for the products’ infrared light guns and sensors was developed by the United States Army in the 1970’s — I guess it was an Ender’s Game-type scenario. And the first game system using the technology was South Bend’s Star Trek Electronic Phaser Guns in 1979. (Those toys were released in conjunction with the premiere of that year’s “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”)
Didn’t see that one coming. I’ll bet those toys fetch a nice price among collectors.
Anyway, there was another Laser Tag commercial that everybody talked about back in the day … it depicted American and Russian teams competing in a dystopian-future tournament, in which the Statue of Liberty was the trophy. It’s smile-inducing. I couldn’t find a really decent copy of it to link to here, but you can find it on Youtube.
“The Poseidon Adventure” (1972) and “The Towering Inferno” (1974) were two seminal big-budget disaster action flicks produced by Irwin Allen. They were both based on popular novels, they both had all-star ensemble casts, and they both found their way to network television fairly quickly. They were both pretty decent flicks, too, I think … although I admittedly only saw them broadcast when I was very young. (My best guess is that I caught them sometime around 1979 or 1980; I’d have been in the second or third grade.)
They both made a big impression on me. Although “The Poseidon Adventure” is probably the better known of the two, it was “The Towering Inferno” that truly got under my skin. It had its share of frightening sequences — at least by 1970’s standards.
The one I remember the most is one of its two famous “elevator scenes.” After the plot-driving fire breaks out to create the titular burning high-rise, some panicking partygoers try to take an elevator directly to the street, past the burning floors — even after they’re warned not to try such an escape route. The result (which you can see in the third video below) was pretty scary stuff, at least to a kid my age, just before 1980’s action films would thoroughly desensitize me to this sort of thing. (It was not a decade known for nonviolent movies.) The outcome of the scene sent a pretty big message to me about the importance of following the authorities’ instructions during a disaster.
Both “The Poseidon Adventure” and “The Towering Inferno” were also among the paperbacks that littered the backseat of my father’s car. (Cars and closets and coffee tables in the house where I grew up were veritable small libraries; my father wasn’t reading Joyce or Dostoevsky, but lord knows that man read a lot.) In the case of the latter film, “The Glass Inferno” was the name of the original book by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson. Believe it or not, I can remember asking my Dad what the word “inferno” meant. And I remember being fascinated, for some reason, by the idea that filmmakers could change the name of a story when adapting it. (The people who made movies could do anything they wanted!)
They actually remade “The Poseidon Adventure” a few years back … I saw it, and I might have even reviewed it for this blog. I can’t say that it was memorable, though. Indeed, the only thing I can recall about it was the presence of the priceless Kurt Russell.
Or maybe it was terrific, and I just don’t remember that. I am getting old — after all, I was a second grader in 1979.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 