On this date, 38 years ago, Top Gun was released and the movie changed forever.
From the opening shot, Top Gun captured the attention of audiences who understood that, though the film’s script may have been full of cliches and though the movie was basically just a remake of the old service moves of the late 30s and 40s, it didn’t matter because jets are freaking cool.
And that opening scene is today’s scene that I love!
Happy Top Gun Day!
Rick Martin (Sterling Hayden) rides his horse into his hometown of Casper, Wyoming. He has an important message to deliver to the town marshal but first, he visits his mother’s grave and discovers that there is a maker with his name on it and an open grave waiting for him. Many of the other makers are for people who are specifically identified as have been “Murdered by Rick Martin.”
Rick is notorious for being a gunslinger and most of the town considers him to be nothing but a murderer, despite Rick’s claim that he’s never shot anyone who didn’t try to shoot him first. Despite the town’s feelings towards him, Rick warns his old friend, Marshal Bat Davis (James Millican), that the notorious outlaw Tom Quentin (John Dehner) is coming to Casper and is planning on tearing the place up. Rick offers to stick around and help fight Quentin and his men but the city council orders him to leave.
City councilman Canby Judd (William Bishop) especially wants to get rid of Rick. Judd murdered Rick’s mother for her land and he is also engaged to Rick’s former girlfriend, Laura (Karin Booth). When Rick asks Laura to come to California with him, Judd and his gunslinger (played by Rod Taylor, in one of his first film roles) conspire to put Rick in jail. At first, the town is happy to have Rick behind bars but then Tom Quentin and his gang show up.
Though it will never be the most popular film to use the title, 1955’s Top Gun is an intelligent B-western that puts as much emphasis on the hypocrisy of the town as it does on gunfights and duels. The population sign specifically says that Casper is home to “1,002 law-abiding citizens” and it is obvious that Rick is not considered to be good enough to be one of those citizens. Rick may have a violent past but he’s honest about who he is, unlike the holier-than-thou townspeople who put Rick in jail and then expect him to help them out when the real outlaws arrive. Though the townspeople pretend that there’s no place for someone like Rick Martin in their society, Rick understands the harsh reality of life in the old west. Director Ray Nazarro does a good job choreographing the fight scenes and Sterling Hayden give a tough and angry performance as Rick Martin and he’s supported by an able cast of western regulars. Western fans will find much to enjoy while watching Top Gun.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasion ally Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of Mastodon’s #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We snark our way through it.
Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be 1997’s Drive! Selected and hosted by Sweet Emmy Cat, this movie features Mark Dacascos! So, you know it has to be good!
Following #MondayActionMovie, Brad and Sierra will be hosting the #MondayMuggers live tweet. We will be watching 1986’s Top Gun, starring Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards, and John Stockwell! The film is on Prime!
It should make for a night of fun viewing and I invite all of you to join in. If you want to join the live tweets, just hop onto Mastodon, pull up Drive on YouTube, start the movie at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag! Then, at 10 pm et, switch over to Twitter and Prime, start Top Gun, and use the #MondayMuggers hashtag! The live tweet community is a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
Tom Cruise is 60 years old today! He doesn’t look a day over 36. Insert your own Dorian Gray joke here.
No matter what else you may want to say about Tom Cruise, you can’t deny that he’s one of the last of the genuine movie stars. He’s been a star in since the 80s, doing things onscreen that you could never imagine some of our younger actors even attempting. And right now, Top Gun: Maverick appears to be unstoppable with audiences and critics. There are many reasons for Maverick‘s popularity but one cannot deny that a lot of it is the fact that Cruise just has that old-fashioned movie star charisma.
Today’s scene that I love comes from the first Top Gun. In this scene, Tom Cruise, Anthony Edwards, Val Kilmer, and Rick Rossovich play beach volleyball. The scene kind of comes out of nowhere and there are times when the whole thing comes close to self-parody. (Actually, if we’re going to be honest, it crosses the line into self-parody more than a few times.) But, Cruise and Kilmer manage to save it, like the movie stars they are!
Oh, where to even begin with Top Gun?
First released in 1986, Top Gun is a film that pretty much epitomizes a certain style of filmmaking. Before I wrote this review, I did a little research and I actually read some of the reviews that were published when Top Gun first came out. Though it may be a considered a classic today, critics in 1986 didn’t care much for it. The most common complaint was that the story was trite and predictable. The film’s reliance on style over substance led to many critics complaining that the film was basically just a two-hour music video. Some of the more left-wing critics complained that Top Gun was essentially just an expensive commercial for the military industrial complex. Director Oliver Stone, who released the antiwar Platoon the same year as Top Gun, said in an interview with People magazine that the message of Top Gun was, “If I start a war, I’ll get a girlfriend.”
Oliver Stone was not necessarily wrong about that. The film, as we all know, stars Tom Cruise as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a cocky young Navy flyer who attends the TOPGUN Academy, where he competes with Iceman (Val Kilmer) for the title of Top Gun and where he also spends a lot of time joking around with everyone’s favorite (and most obviously doomed) character, Goose (Anthony Edwards). Maverick does get a girlfriend, Charlie (Kelly McGillis), but only after he’s had plenty of chances to show both how reckless and how skilled he can be while flying in a fighter plane. Though the majority of the film is taken up with scenes of training and volleyball, the end of the film does give Maverick a chance to prove himself in combat when he and Iceman end up fighting a group of ill-defined enemies for ill-defined reasons. It may not be an official war but it’s close enough.
That said, I think Oliver Stone was wrong about one key thing. Maverick doesn’t get a girlfriend because he started a war. He gets a girlfriend because he won a war. Top Gun is all about winning. Maverick and Iceman are two of the most absurdly competitive characters in film history and, as I watched the film last weekend, it was really hard not to laugh at just how much Cruise and Kilmer got into playing those two roles. Iceman and Maverick can’t even greet each other without it becoming a competition over who gave the best “hello.” By the time the two of them are facing each other in a totally savage beach volleyball match, it’s hard to look at either one of them without laughing. And yet, regardless of how over-the-top it may be, you can’t help but get caught up in their rivalry. Cruise and Kilmer are both at their most charismatic in Top Gun and watching the two of them when they were both young and fighting to steal each and every scene, it doesn’t matter that both of them would later become somewhat controversial for their off-screen personalities. What matters, when you watch Top Gun, is that they’re both obviously stars.
“I’ve got the need for speed,” Tom Cruise and Anthony Edwards say as they walk away from their plane. The same thing could be said about the entire movie. Top Gun doesn’t waste any time getting to the good stuff. We know that Maverick is cocky and has father issues because he’s played by Tom Cruise and Tom Cruise always plays cocky characters who have father issues. We know that Iceman is arrogant because he’s played by Val Kilmer. We know that Goose is goofy because his nickname is Goose and he’s married to Meg Ryan. The film doesn’t waste much time on exploring why its characters are the way they are. Instead, it just accepts them for being the paper-thin characters that they are. The film understands that the the most important thing is to get them into their jets and sends them into the sky. Does it matter that it’s sometimes confusing to keep track of who is chasing who? Not at all. The planes are sleek and loud. The men flying them are sexy and dangerous. The music never stops and the sun never goes down unless the film needs a soulful shot of Maverick deep in thought. We’ve all got the need for speed.
In so many ways, Top Gun is a silly film but, to its credit, it also doesn’t make any apologies for being silly. Instead, Top Gun embraces its hyperkinetic and flashy style. That’s why critics lambasted it in 1986 and that’s why we all love it in 2020. And if the pilots of Top Gun do start a war — well, it happens. I mean, it’s Maverick and Iceman! How can you hold it against them? When you watch them fly those planes, you know that even if they start World War III, it’ll be worth it. If the world’s going to end, Maverick’s the one we want to end it.
Take My Breath Away was written by Giorgio Moroder and Tom Whitlock after the producers of Top Gun realized that they needed a romantic scene between Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis and that they would need something other than Danger Zone to play during it. (Originally, the love scene wasn’t in the finished film but when test audiences said that they would like to see one, Cruise and McGillis were brought back to quickly shoot one. McGillis had dyed her hair for another film, which is why the scene itself is shot in silhouette.)
The song was originally offered to The Motels but it was eventually recorded by Berlin. (Terri Nunn, the lead singer of Berlin, was one of the contenders for the role of Princess Leia in Star Wars and would have been cast in the role if, for some reason, Carrie Fisher hadn’t worked out.) Like most of the soundtrack-related music videos of the 80s, the video for Take My Breath Away is a mix of clips from the film and clips of the band performing.
Enjoy!
For better or worse, few songs have come to epitomize a decade to the extent that Danger Zone has come to epitomize the 1980s.
The song was originally written by Giorgio Moroder and Tom Whitlock for the Top Gun soundtrack. When the film’s producers heard the demo (performed by background singer Joe Pizzulo), they knew they wanted the song but they also knew they wanted it to be performed by a big name artist.
The problem was that no one wanted to perform it.
Byran Adams thought that the song and its use in the film would glorify war. (He wasn’t wrong.)
Corey Hart, best known for Sunglasses at Night, turned down the opportunity because he only wanted to record songs that he had written.
REO Speedwagon (!) declined an offer when they were informed that they wouldn’t be allowed to contribute any other songs to the soundtrack.
Toto came close to recording the song but their lawyers couldn’t come to an agreement with the production’s lawyers. (Toto’s song, Only You, was also originally written for the film but was rejected in favor of Take My Breath Away.)
In the end, it was Kenny Loggins who finally agreed to perform the song and the rest, as they say, is history. Not only was the film a huge hit but it spawned one of the best-selling soundtracks of the 1980s. Fueled by the film’s success, Danger Zone reached the #2 spot on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.
As for the video, it was directed by Tony Scott (who, of course, also directed Top Gun). The video mixes footage from the film with shots of Kenny Loggins deep in thought, which makes it appear that Loggins simply can’t stop thinking about the first time that Maverick and Goose met Charlie. This video has been called “the most effective recruiting poster ever produced.”
For me, though, Danger Zone will always be the song that I used to hear while listening to the classic rock station in Los Santos.
Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet
Last week, we considered whether or not Out of Africa deserved the title of best picture of 1985. As of this writing, the votes would seem to indicate that most of you feel that it did not.
For this week, let’s jump ahead one year to 1986. According to the Academy, the five best films of the year were:
1) Children of a Lesser God, an adaptation of play about an angry deaf girl and the teacher who falls in love with her,
2) Hannah and Her Sisters, a Woody Allen film about three sisters and the neurotic people they know,
3) The Mission, a film about Jesuit missionaries in South America that also won the Palme d’Or at Cannes,
4) Room With A View, James Ivory’s super romantic adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel,
and finally, the winner,
5) Platoon, Oliver Stone’s autobiographical film about the Viet Nam war.
Unlike Out of Africa, Platoon has remained a fairly respected winner. Still, was Platoon actually the best film of 1986? If I had been a member of the Academy back in 1986, I would have been torn between A Room With A View and Hannah and Her Sisters with my final vote going to Room With A View. How about you?
Now, here comes the fun part. Let’s say that Platoon turned out to be a disaster. Let’s say that Room With A View never made it over to American theaters and maybe Woody Allen decided to retire early. Let’s say that none of the best picture nominees had been eligible to be nominated. Which five films would have nominated in their place?
You can vote for up to five films and yes, write-ins are accepted!
(I voted for Blue Velvet, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty In Pink, Betty Blue, and Something Wild.)
So, another day of resting up after a wickedly long weekend of doing nothing but working I came across this little video that brought back memories of not just my youth during the 80’s but also fond ones of discovering one of my favorite anime of all-time.
The latest “AMV of the Day” comes courtesy of TrepidationsFall and it’s combines that 80’s blockbuster of blockbusters in Top Gun and one of the best anime of all-time in Macross Plus. The video is simply called “Danger Zone” and the use of the iconic Kenny Loggins track for the Bruckheimer fighter-jock extravaganza fits the mecha anime to a “T”.
Anime: Macross Plus
Song: “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins
Creator: TrepidationsFall
Past AMVs of the Day
Through the Shattered Lens 