El Blanco Boogie

Aaron Guadamuz

Ah yes….the glorious 80’s! It was a time when we had real dreams and real pain. There were arcades, drive in movies and school dances actually had bands supply the music. Bands…..imagine that! We still believed in something and more than anything else we wanted to dance! The dance sequence was as common in films as a chic in every high school taking style tips from Pat Benatar. Time caught up with us and just like that awkward speech you gave on ethnic appreciation day, or the time you knocked over baby Jesus during the Christmas play, you wish to hell that it all hadn’t been caught on tape.

But it was…

Here are five dance scenes from the 80’s that are arguably terrible or incredible.

1. Fast Times with Jefferson

In the same way that after all the powerful performances, gold statues, humanitarian efforts, and critical praise some of us do not have the ability to see Sean Penn as anything else but Spicoli, for all of the amazing roles that he has been able to inhibit, when the sun sets on the career of Forest Whitaker, only one name will matter……Jefferson.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High is defining movie on many levels. It was the film that saw Cameron Crowe break his screenwriting cherry and it introduced many of us to the concept of abortion and ticket scalping (not necessarily in that order). It was also before the internet debunked everything and we dreamed of high school being a place where we can listen to Zeppelin, order a sausage with extra cheese pizza in history class, meet girls that look like Phoebe Cates and most of all….dance. Yes, the dance sequence at the end of Fast Times was a seminal moment in our young lives. Damone makes good with Rat, Spicoli makes a grand entrance after escaping the clutches of Mr. Hand, but the hottest and inexplicably strangest moves on the floor belonged to the school’s most feared linebacker, Earth Wind and Fire fan and future Oscar winner, Jefferson.

It is a definite pickle for me to put this on the list because this dance has arguably aged very well, but it does belong on the list because of the six ton albino woolly mammoth in the room that it produces in the form of one simple question…..

Were these Jefferson’s real life moves at the time, or was he taught this dance for the film? If I had to bet a limb on it, I wouldn’t bet on the latter.

2. Exorcising the demons of rhythmless whitey

Forget the sociopath he played on Dexter, or how he was once DePalma’s go to psycho, or even his turn as Sasquatch (oh wait, he played the dad in that movie). If we truly take a look at Lithgow’s storied career, by far his most demented character was the bible thumper whose mission in life was to suppress the evils of dancing, and the kids in the local high school wanted to dance. They WANTED to dance. I will be the first to admit that Footloose is an easy target here but, truth being told, dancing Kevin Bacon represented a lot of things to kids who grew up under fundamentalist Christian oppression. Sometimes all you could do was drive 15 minutes out of town to find an abandoned hay factory to let loose in.

There is a scene in the movie that did not age well but arguably had already expired upon the films release. Under Bacon’s new dance movement, everyone needed to get some chops on the floor and the biggest challenge was transforming Chris Penn from a rhythmless awkward cowboy into a full blown master of the Shiro Shuffle.

In the grand tradition of montages that took us from pain to glory (mostly pain for the audience), we see Penn go from learning to click his fingers to the beat, to a full blown moon walk in his Tony Llamas.

3. Not bad for a white boy

These were the words actually uttered by Tom Cruise as he began to move to the straight up bizarre keyboard music coming from a boom box in the home team locker room in All the Right Moves. What is utterly fascinating about this scene is how everyone in that locker room is eager to get down. The second that music starts, everyone drops what they are doing and starts  gyrating (the most bizarre being a guy in a jock strap who appears to be in his 40’s and is hairier than Ron Jeremy). When the coach, mandatorily played under state law by the great Craig T. Nelson, emerges from his office to see what the commotion is, he is instantly taken by the beat and starts flaunting his own moves until coming to his senses and yelling something like “LET’S GET IT TOGETHER LADIES!!!!”

All the Right Moves is definitely Cruise at his absolute finest. As the star quarterback who catches some bad breaks, the small town angst oozes from this seminal, pre LRH performance. Because of this film every time I see him hop from a helicopter into a nuclear reactor while being shot at by 50 dudes with automatic weapons, do his famous top speed run to tell the woman he loves that she had him at hello (oh wait, I think she says that), or going to Tijuana to party with Jackie Earle Haley (ever see Losing it…didn’t think so), or climbing over another Thetan on his way to Xenu, I can’t help but think………

 Not bad for a white boy…

4. We’re gonna do it for Johnny

If you were paying attention to American pop culture during the 80’s, there is a strong possibility that John Hughes was part of your life. I remember thinking that Ferris Bueller was the coolest person that ever lived and that Kelly LeBrock was the hottest chic ever (full disclosure…I still think that). This was all courtesy of Hughes, but as pointed out by one of his go to stars, Molly Ringwald, some of the stuff in his flicks didn’t age all that well.

Maybe it’s best to not put the girl who is at point of blackout drunkenness in a position where the next day she will “have a feeling” that she dug what happened to her the night before. Maybe it would have been better to not name your only Asian character Long Duk Dong and have him act in a way that rivals the portrayal of Asians in WWII era Bugs Bunny cartoons. Maybe grabbing your dream girl’s ass during a kiss just hours after she falls for you isn’t the hottest of moves. When I think back to this time, I realize that we either laughed at or enjoyed all these things to some extent and while it is true that this was a different era, these sentiments have now earned their come uppence. Just ask Brett Kavanaugh. According to him, back then drunken pool party attacks on girls weren’t yet considered sexual assault and all those horrible jokes that were made were just the boys quoting Caddyshack.

We do need to give Hughes some credit for creating the greatest screen character of the 1980’s, and by that, yes, I mean Chet.

The film that arguably crowned Hughes as the man who defined teenage life during the 80’s was The Breakfast Club. I remember being taken back by Bender’s description of how in his house he is punished by being used as a human ash tray. I felt the pressure coming from the dad (who I imagine being John Goodman in Revenge of the Nerds) of the douchebag jock played by Emilio Estevez that caused him to prey on weaker individuals in the locker room and subject them to things that you would find at the Folsom Street Fair. I remember thinking Ally Sheedy was gross and that my attraction to Molly Ringwald would fluctuate between scenes. I remember thinking the principal and janitor were badasses. As much as date rape, under the table sexual assaults, over the top racial stereotypes and Uncle Buck have not aged well, they have not aged nearly as horribly as the Breakfast club dance sequence.

In retrospect, I remember not minding this scene. Hell, I may have even looked forward to it! The dance sequence is a cringe worthy exercise in extraneous cinema that seems to have almost been a staple in the era (even though I can’t instantly think of one other film that randomly had a dance scene, I know there were many). How is that even written into a script? I imagine 75 full pages of scene descriptions and dialogue and then one page that just says DANCE SEQUENCE in the middle. Forget the war on drugs, Iran/Contra, the Chicago Bears rap album, Gordon Jump as a pedophile on Different Strokes, flared and paint splashed workout pants, or Jefferson Starship, none of those hold a candle to the Breakfast Club dance sequence as an example of how the 80’s were truly a decade of horrible ideas.

5. Bastards of Young

At age 13 I was an absolute loser, and, if you were lucky, so were you. People that were perceived as being too cool at that age likely peaked in high school, had some kind of vehicle (probably a truck) that represented their identity and when the level playing field of college came around, were in for a real surprise. That is unless you attended Adams College and were able to make it on to the Ted McGinley/Ogre led football team. For the rest of us life took it’s time and we had no choice but to retreat to those safe places of video games, role playing games, skateboarding and summer movies.

Ah yes!! The summertime movie and all it’s glory. I’ll never forget seeing Jedi for the first time on the last day of the 3rd grade or anticipating the Friday night release of a new Van Damme stinker. We still had drive ins where we could pay for one person and sneak in 12. At age 13, I went to Hawaii with a friend during summer vacation and there were beaches, sun and skate spots everywhere but where did we spend most of our time? At the movies of course! We were eagerly awaiting the sequel to Revenge of the Nerds, ROTN 2: Nerds in Paradise and we watched it as soon as we could. We watched it again.....and again................

I am not sure if I should be ashamed of the fact that we saw the film 5 times in the theater. I still wonder if there is anyone else on earth that did the same. In our defense, the 4th and 5th time we left after the last part that we found funny. It was a scene when the nerds were being pulled from the cabin of a boat one by one and thrown into the water, banishing them to a small nearby deserted island (likely prime real estate in today’s market). When the great Curtis Armstrong (Booger) is pulled out by two jocks he turns to his left and yells, “OGRE...YOU SWINE!!”. At that exact moment we got up and left the theater.

Although there were incredible views, beaches, and weather, we were dying for new movies to watch. We were turned away from seeing Full Metal Jacket for being too young and James Bond at the time was Timothy Dalton. Finally we got a break with the teen comedy Can’t Buy Me Love, starring a young Patrick Demsey as an insufferable loser dying for better social status at his high school. So all of us who were pencil necks, dorks, spazzes, geeks, nerds and losers can feel a little better knowing that McDreamy himself once walked among us.

It was the story of a boy who mowed lawns for years to earn enough to buy a telescope but when he goes to buy it is presented with the unique opportunity of helping the hottest girl in school, who is in a bind and needs the exact amount of money that he has on him. Nothing in life is free of course and her price......she has to act like his girlfriend and make him cool. It takes a minute but before you know it he is the coolest of them all and a traitor to the geeks. In an act of peer pressure he even “wild shitbombs” his best friends house. Eventually his contract with his dream girl is up and he proceeds to move on to the other trim that is now waiting in line for his affection. He has a hot date for the dance, but of course has zero skills. He did what any other kid would do and watch American Bandstand for the latest moves. The problem was that he was mistakenly watching a PBS special on the African Anteater Dance. We all see where this is headed.

This scene likely crosses all kinds of lines of political correctness but I am not qualified to properly identify them. All I know is the scene gives me the feeling that I had when I was a kid and had the distinct feeling that what I was doing was wrong, yet I didn’t exactly know why. McDreamy shocks everyone at first with his bizarre moves and then has the entire school engulfed in some kind of bizarre indigenous ritual that some screenwriter at the time just thought was fine to exploit. Ultimately, there is only one person who can make the call on this one.......

YOU!!

So tonight when you lay your weary head to rest and look back at those pics from 85’ and think how your male half shirt, nuthuggers, kneehighs and parted in the middle, feathered haircut didn’t survive the following decades, you can rest assured that they certainly did a lot better than your moves on the dance floor.