There are a few decades in film history that have been as scrutinized as the 1980s, but to really understand the decade and its movies, it's going to take a couple of someone's who were there for it the first time around.

Drew McQueenie and Scott Weinberg are ready to review every major film of the decade, one month at a time. The look at what worked then, what endoers now, and how it felt to be there when it all went down. Turn back the calendar with us. It's the 80s all over. I'm gonna have to go back to the hotel.

I'm gonna have to go back to the hotel.

I'm gonna have to go back to the hotel. It's the 80s all over. I read and memorized ghostings for a few years. For 30 years,well's 1984, which I actually used to think was science fiction. Thriller sat at the top of the charts for 37 straight weeks.

That is amazing.

What finally knocked it out of the number one spot? The Footloose soundtrack. For the first time ever, US astronauts attempted an in-space satellite repair and the Challenger crew actually managed to successfully return the Solar Max satellite to service. And in what was unquestionably the biggest story of the month, Dr. J. Levy and his team announced the discovery of the AIDS virus, finally giving name to a rising international

crisis that would change the face of the decade that was just starting to swing in April of 1984. Hi everybody, I'm Drew McQueenie and welcome to 80s all over. I'm joined as always by my co-host Scott Weinberg. Scott, how are you today? I am ready. It's April. It's 1984. We just got off our biggest episode ever and it might be our reference quality episode Like when people say what episode should I start with? I might start telling them March 84 Part of it is the variety and what we're seeing right now is the the 80s kind of really start to assert their personality and become the 80s That we recognize and we talk about Real quick before we get started I wanted to once again take the time to thank the people who already support us on Patreon and encourage the rest of you to give it a try for a month. There is so much bonus material there now with such a great range of guests with a great range of topics. I feel like there is an alternate show that's happening over there and I'm really excited by it. So I want you guys to check it out if you haven't. Scott, I've been waiting for so long. I mean, there aren't many truly historical landmark films of this year, really. And I think it's important that we look back and nail down the exact moment that we realized Rick Springfield was a movie star. that I can't roll up maybe two different for their love to last hard to hold read a PG now playing at feeders everywhere check newspapers for locations and showtimes I'm going to share a joke with our audience that I tweeted and it unexpectedly took off the joke was I can't help but think that Rick Springfield would have had a much better chance with Jesse's girl if he knew her actual name. I just was reading the other day an oral history of battle struggle, I swear to God this connects, but they were talking about how they cast the original Glenn Larson. Well, he's in it, right? I know how it connects. He's in the pilot episode, right? I guess he was part of a program at Universal where they hired actors. They would put them under contract for certain amount of time for a certain amount of

Appearances per year and whatever they told them. And so Springfield was one of these young actors who's in the same group, the same class as Hatch and Benedict and some of the other guys. You know, for years, I think Universal tried to figure out where to use him and clearly acting was on the radar from the start for him. And then he took off as a pop star and so this movie feels like both those things colliding like he's playing a pop star

But we're going to finally give him a movie. And it's even from Universal. So maybe there's burning a contract out. But this was as close as they ever came to giving him all the shot he could get. Yeah, there's a reason he wasn't a movie star. We have a popular pop star who fancies them self-actor and we put them in the lead role, we'll get to a lot of these throughout the decade. Some of them are surprisingly decent. Some of them are awesome, like disorderly's. But this one is just like, it feels like somebody dug a screenplay that no one produced from 1942 about a petulant rock star and the even more petulant woman he tries to woo. It's not romantic, there's no real drama. It literally feels like how can we get six ricks bring field songs into a soundtrack album. Oh, we have to make a movie. Oh, okay, let's make the movie. And that's how it came about. Right before we started recording, we were talking with Bobby about Star Is born. And you know, the new version is Star is born.

It's exactly what you think it is.

And there's certain stories that have been told a thousand times. Real quick, how is it five on a five star scale? How is the Lady Gaga Bradley Cooper? It's like three and a half four stars. I think it's really well made. It's as authentically felt a manipulative movie as you're going to see this here. Oh boy, that's a qualified compliment.

Jard, you know who wrote hard to hold?

It wasn't stand for Sherman, but it's... a manipulative movie as you're going to see this here. Oh boy. That's a qualified compliment.

Drew, do you know who wrote Hard to Hold? It wasn't Stand for Sherman, but it was my nemesis, the gentleman who wrote Footloose. Oh, okay. That's who you go to if you want something mindless and facile related to music. This guy. But my point of bringing up Starsborne is this is that same formula, which is it's so hard to be a star and I'm going to meet somebody and you're gonna come into my world and then we're gonna

clash because... But my point in bringing up stars, born, is this is that same formula, which is it's so hard to be a star

and I'm going to meet somebody and you're gonna come into my world and then we're gonna clash because You don't understand what it's like in the lights and and the difference here is that she has no interest in this world She just wants to date him She's terrible in this movie Janet Elber is her name Albert and it's a thankless role The writer is she felt like she's playing Catherine Hepburn the whole movie in a way and she never really thaws out and and it's the problem of Springfield as well is that Nobody in this movie is behaving like an actual adult behavior in this situation like he is so Brain-damaged as a rock star that oh I got locked out of a stadium and I have no pants on Ho ho ho your official ring sprick field impression? It is. It's pretty accurate, isn't it? All right, let's log that into the Drew impression gallery because I like it anytime We're expecting feel left to go back. Yeah, did you notice who directed this? I know it's Larry Pierce. He derived the last movie was love child That's like a sincere drama, well made, well wrought, tear

jerker. I think what you're gonna find is that Love Child was the exception, because if you look at the other side of the mountain, or if you look at the movie he's got coming later this decade wired, Larry Pierce is a criminal. And the biggest problem with a film like this is if the music doesn't really sell you, then you're waiting for nothing. You're waiting for them to get to what's gonna feel like filler. And every concert scene in this is interminable. They sound like songs that were turned down for Barney. They're that simplistic. Like, let's go rock, clap, clap, clap. Let's go rock. I mean, it really, it's not just simplistic. It sounds like children's music. It's atrocious. If you want to see Rick Springfield's butt, grab a glass of wine and have at it. But otherwise, it is almost unbearable. When character actor hunting is the literal most fun you can have with a movie, I'm going to guess you're going to play some character actor hunting with this next one, because certainly, at least with the adult cast, there are some faces to pick out. This is a really weird children's film called Kig-ko. This is such a start making the big box. The kids had cooked up worse schemes. I haven't recovered from last summer's losses. But never a better one. Can't be that simple. That's what they said about the guy who ran into theisbee. Their horses make all the fertilizer. Me, you are competition. And they make all the money. The pile of advertising. Until it all backfired. Sort of. But when the kids get their day in court, watch out IBM. So we got to stick together in spite with our last ounce of the milk. Ginger, it's about the sweet smell of success. From Ron Maxwell, director of Little Darling's and The Night the Lights, What Out in Georgia. Written by a gentleman named Ben Traemer, isn't that the guy who got killed in Halloween that they keep talking about? Yeah, yeah. If only Jamie Lee Curtis had been with him. But this guy wrote without warning and later co-created... Saved by the bell. Wow. To give a really sad picture of just how insane I was about movies and anything movie related, I ordered from the book fair, the little scholastic book fair order form that you would get. I ordered the kick-co novelization. Wow! Scotchworts plays a kid who is a hustler. Scotchworts who you may remember from the toy and a Christmas story. This would be his final feature after this. He had a career in porn. Turbulent life. turbulent. I know this was an HBO staple for about a year and a half, probably around 86, 85. I had never seen this until last week. Like I said, red the novelization, never saw the film. And my first impression is this. Scotchworts is one of those super unnatural, hyper adult kid actors to build a movie around. It's off-putting. He is an unpleasant lead. The kid who plays his sister Nene. Oh, she is a delight. She is hilarious in every single moment she has in the movie. She's really funny. She manages to make a lot out of a little. And the movie itself is this hustler kid who gets an idea after his dad basically says you can't hustle the entire school for poker money. And he decides to go into the manure business for a local golf course and then expands to a number of other businesses and goes head to head with the only manure company in town who then tries to put them out of business using the courts, turning this into essentially a kitty-caper film about shit. We need to come up with a term for these types of comedies which are very rarely laugh out loud funny but are still amiable enough to hold your attention because I don't think I laughed out loud more than once or twice in this movie but I was into the story, I was curious to see how the kids would win. It reminds me of like a feature-length, little rascals movie in a way. It's also very Reagan era, and it's a little right wing in terms of sort of the pro-business take in things. It is a relic of its moment, but not a terrible one. Now we can move on to something that is terrible. I believe that if you look at

today's, sayp white guys who are villains in teen sex comedies. Did they not all grow up to be McConnell and Orrin Hatch and Lindsey Graham? Did they not all grow up to be those guys? They literally are the bad guys from our 80s movies now running the world and going back and looking at this stuff, it's amazing how normalized so much of this is. And we're going to get into the next couple of months, we get a whole fistful of these. I've watched about three of them the last day. This one is barely above porn in terms of production value. I'm not even talking content, just production value. It's cheesy. And it's a Playboy Channel production. It was the first Playboy Channel production. Apparently, you know, some brains over at Playboy thought, oh my god, porkeys and losing it and Playboy should be in that business. It could have been a great idea if they hadn't cut every single corner. If they had actually hired a decent writer and a decent director, instead of going to Chuck Vincent, The Foo, a B-movie machine, he would later give them Hollywood hot tubs. It's a three-stooge's premise for a movie. And more interesting than anything about this movie is the legal battle that MGM fought over the word preppies because they had a movie called The Last American Preppy, which later became Making the Grade, which we'll get to next month. Between this and that, this is the introduction of that cultural icon, the Preppy. And the book had been before this. The Preppy handbook had come out before this, but it takes a little while for stuff to trickle into movies. I barely could tolerate this one. This is Ugly from Start to Finish. And if you feel like you got too much production value from porquies then yes, preppies is for you. And what's crazy is that there was a moment where preppy was not a bad thing. Preppy was something people wanted to be and they wanted, it was an identity that people chased and people would go to the store and they would buy their preppy look. We'll get to some movies in which preppy characters usually played by what he was Andrew McCarthy are slightly more interesting but this movie is atrocious and I don't care that it's made by playboy and I don't care that it's barely you know mostly softcore porn it's not funny if you're not gonna build a single joke into it then I'm not gonna bother calling it a comedy yeah it's a trauma style at best yeah and, over to Drew McQueenie with his new segment,

Horsey Horse Double Feature,

in which he'll review two movies about Horsey's

and how they relate to men up first,

an obscure John Hurt film called Champions.

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