Category: Daily Dispatch

Was 1982 the Summer of Fun?

Projecting myself back 40 years, on the cusp of Memorial Day weekend, I was already caught in the gravitational pull of summer. Sure, school was still on its molasses creep toward final exams and their denouement, the padding of allotted days in hot classrooms until the final bell.

But I had already seen “Conan the Barbarian” (with a hilarious weeknight audience in a mostly empty theater), I was reading Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” in anticipation of the release of “Blade Runner,” and on top-40 radio “Chariots of Fire” was sharing air time with “Ebony and Ivory.”

There was war in the Falkland Islands, and “Jane Fonda’s Workout” was everywhere, but on the whole, for a high school student in the U.S., summer was about to crest and life was good.

Here are just some of the popcorn movies that were issued in the summer of ’82, with their release dates, and in parentheses, their composers.

“The Sword and the Sorcerer” (David Whitaker), April 23
“Conan the Barbarian” (Basil Poledouris), May 14
“Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” (Miklos Rozsa), May 21
“The Road Warrior” (Brian May), May 21
“Rocky III” (Bill Conti), May 28
“Poltergeist” (Jerry Goldsmith), June 4
“Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” (James Horner), June 4
“E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial” (John Williams), June 11
“Blade Runner” (Vangelis), June 25
“The Thing” (Ennio Morricone), June 25
“The Secret of Nimh” (Jerry Goldsmith), July 2
“Tron” (Wendy Carlos), July 9
“The Beastmaster” (Lee Holdridge), August 20

I would come to own most of the soundtracks for these movies. In fact, the only three missing from my collection are “The Secret of Nimh,” “Tron,” and “Rocky III” (not that I want it).

And these were just the foil on a roll of SweeTarts, the tip of a bottomless box of Nonpareils. There were interesting and diverting movies released all summer long, many of them quite good – among them “Fitzcarraldo,” “Annie,” “Gregory’s Girl,” “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy,” “The World According to Garp,” “An Officer and a Gentleman,” “Night Shift,” “Pink Floyd: The Wall,” and “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”

On July 4, I was 16 years-old, I could legally drive to a movie theater, and the world was my oyster.

Were all of the movies good? Not all of them were on a level with “E.T.” or “The Road Warrior” or “Fitzcarraldo,” but most of them have endured fondly in memory, as pop cultural touchstones for a certain generation, or at the very least as guilty pleasures. (There’s a reason I’ve included “The Sword and the Sorcerer,” even though it opened in April.)

Going by film scores alone, I often cite 1982 as Hollywood’s Second Golden Year – the First, of course, widely accepted as 1939. Few of the movies were of the caliber of those released at the time of “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone with the Wind,” among many, many others, but the music for even the weakest of ‘82 was generally of a very high quality.

By 1982, the “summer movie” was a well-oiled machine. There may have been no “Star Wars” and no “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” but man there was a lot of fun and fantasy to be enjoyed in an air-conditioned theater.

“Jaws” may have given rise to the modern summer blockbuster in 1975, but it wasn’t until “Star Wars” – released on May 25, 1977, a Wednesday, on the week leading up to Memorial Day – that the industry was codified. That’s when the studios figured out that the lazy days of summer were being underutilized as a dumping ground for low expectations and undemanding fare. The old thinking was, it’s summer, right? People are busy. They’re on vacation. Who’s going to go to the movies?

Now of course the summer movie mentality is year-round, whenever they feel like dropping another Marvel movie. But the magic that so indelibly marked the summer moviegoing experience from the mid-‘70s through the mid-‘80s seems to have entirely dissipated. Who knows, maybe it’s my age. But I think I am correct in observing that commercialism has long since outstripped creativity, if not craft, and a lot of the soul has been superseded by breakneck editing, refinery noise, and computer-generated nightmares.

Alas, the change of seasons now holds little significance for me, in terms of entertainment. Going to the movies in the summer is no longer a part of my routine. Gone are the days when I would actually create a countdown calendar in anticipation of the next “Star Wars” sequel, or that I would leaf through the movie ads, with their alluring artwork, in the Friday newspapers.

I guess to some extent I’ve put away childish things. (Don’t you believe it!) But it’s not because I’ve abandoned the movies. Rather, it’s the movies that have abandoned me.

When I die, if they let me into Heaven, I hope it’s a little bit like 1982.