“1985 was a good year,” sings Passion Pit on the chorus of their latest single Lifted Up, which is weird because the lead singer wasn’t born until 1987.
For me personally, it just so happens 1985 was, as Tori Amos sings, a “pretty good year.”
Despite the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, courtesy of the still lingering Cold War, I was about to become a man. Ferociously distracted from studying my Bar Mitzvah haftarah via my tutor’s audio-taped recording, I found bliss in the growing availability of videotape rentals, an increased love for all-things-horror, and, of course, becoming a teenager at last.
Don’t get me wrong. 1985 wasn’t the year I bloomed.
Puberty wouldn’t show signs until at least sophomore year (awkward), I was still sporting incredibly nerdy bifocals that took up half my face, and my parents still didn’t have cable.
I do remember going to the movies in 1985.
A lot of movies.
And a lot of those movies were seen with my parents, including first-time, opening-weekends of Back to the Future, Silver Bullet, and Cat’s Eye. I have a particularly fond memory of seeing Fright Night with my best friend Jon on my 13th birthday. I remember tracking down the ‘B’ ending of Clue in a theater after seeing version ‘C.’ And I remember laughing so hard during the opening sequence of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure that I had to run to the bathroom.
My fondest movie memory of 1985, however is seeing Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome with my dad on opening night.
He was a big Tina Turner fan (a lot of folks were, after her 1984 LP Private Dancer released and went 5 x Platinum), so naturally we had to see her in her first major role since Tommy. I was a big fan of action and horror films, despite not having seen the original Mad Max yet, nor the sequel.
Though arguably the worst of the three original films, MMBT nevertheless rocked my world.
To this easily impressionable new teenager, the movie was loud, violent, funny, scary, and sometimes inappropriate. Because it depicted a post-nuclear world, which I’d later discover was even more desolate than the world of the first two films, I think I dug it even more.
This wasn’t the gory terror Jason Robards found himself in from The Day After, and it wasn’t the gung-ho team-power of Red Dawn.
Under all the dusty crud of Bartertown, was a sharp reality that seemed completely plausible,
Milk Dud by Milk Dud.
The “two men enter, one man leaves” stakes of Thunderdome were simply a few chainsaws and sledgehammers more than Hulk Hogan and King Kong Bundy’s Steel Cage match at the very first Wrestlemania, four months prior.
This could happen.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the Iran-Contra affair was able to take under our noses, Dian Fossey was about to be found murdered in Rwanda and John Gotti pulled off the hit that would put him at the top of the Gambino crime family. As we were warned in the movie, “fighting leads to killing and killing gets to warring…”
Can you blame any of us for wanting to escape to a much more entertaining world powered by pig feces methane?
Though we now live in a much less grim Tomorrow-morrow Land, we’re blessed that we can step up, spin the wheel, and welcome ourselves to another edition of Thunderdome!
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