The original Footloose was sort of a ‘watershed’ movie for me. It was the first ‘pirate’ movie I had ever watched.
Of course this was 1984 and my brother knew a boy, who knew a boy at school who had this new thing called ‘the internet’ and he could talk to people all over the world on it.
Anyway,he knew a guy who got the latest movies on the still relatively new VHS (google it) format. So there we were, 4 pubescent schoolboys, curtains closed, huddled in the dark, eyes fixed on the flashing box in the corner. Good days.
We were rebels, outlaws on the edge and we had Lori Singer. It was a pretty good teen movie if I remember, the plot (if you didn’t know), concerns the effect a new kid has on coming to a town where dancing has been banned.
It had a strong cast, including Kevin Bacon, John Lithgow and the now sadly deceased Chris Penn (Nice Guy Eddie from Reservoir Dogs) as a boy who couldn’t dance. Kenny Loggins also did a great theme song for it.
Incidentally in 1998, they also went on to make a West End Show, Footloose: The Musical, (but I didn’t see that).
The 2011 version stars recent newcomers Kenny Wormald (right), Julianne Hough (right) with Dennis Quaid as the Rev Shaw Moore, the man intent on spoiling the party.
Cynical people would say this movie is a desperate attempt to mop up the ‘Glee’ audience, but you never know, if it has even half the charm of the original it will be worth watching, just take a big bag of popcorn with you and leave your brain at home.
Meanwhile back in the 80’s we followed Footloose with Flashdance, and then Ghostbusters, and then suddenly the stream of pirate videos ran dry. It wasn’t too bad though, ‘the times they were a changing’, and along came the Sega Mega Drive and a blue thing called ‘Sonic the Hedgehog‘.
[nggallery id=65]Footloose is released in the UK on October 14th 2011