Flash Gordon saves the universe as part of as splashy December 1980

Plus Popeye! Dolly! DeNiro! And Vanity has sex with an ape!

The premise is simple, but the task is not. Every single movie released in the United States during the 1980s, reviewed in chronological order, published month by month.

Buckle up, because this is The Last ‘80s Newsletter You’ll Ever Need…

DECEMBER

Led Zeppelin broke up.
Magnum PI debuted on CBS as The Wonderful World Of Disney came to a close on NBC.
United States copyright law was amended to finally allow computer programs.

And, in one of the most shocking moments of the entire decade, as John Lennon and Yoko Ono returned to their apartment in New York just before 11:00 at night, the troubled Mark David Chapman shot Lennon in the back four times.

There are a number of significant milestones for me as a movie lover.

The summer of ’77 was a huge one, and I emerged from that summer changed in some pretty foundational ways. The next major one where I felt like it all came together at once was December of 1980. My movie mania had been building all year long, and in writing about 1980 so far, I have been soaking in my memories of that time and place.

Part of what was going on in 1980 was that I was driving the decision-making about which movies we saw. Not every single time we went, but often enough that I felt some autonomy for the first time. I felt like I was the consumer that was being targeted instead of feeling like an accessory to my parents. The things I was excited about became all-consuming to me, one or two obsessions at a time. I’d spent much of the year completely immersed in The Empire Strikes Back, and as the year closed, two new movies landed on me with enough force to temporarily make me give Empire a rest.

The Popeye soundtrack had been on constant rotation as I entered December, and I kept my eyes peeled for any book tie-ins to the film. Bridget Terry’s The Popeye Story was a making-of paperback, surprisingly well-written, offering a nuts-and-bolts view of the entire process. There’s no way you could get a book this honest past a studio today while they’re trying to launch a blockbuster. Richard J. Anobile’s adaptation, which was almost a Fotonovel in terms of how many pictures it used and how it was laid out, was also released. I read both books over and over before I ever got a chance to see the film. That’s how I operated at that point. I didn’t care in which order I experienced something as long as I got to experience it. I would routinely read novelizations first. It didn’t matter at all in terms of my enjoyment.

There was another soundtrack that drove me crazy that month, even though all you could get at first was a single. My friend’s brother had “Flash” as a 45, and the first time I walked into their rec room and heard the opening to that song, I was hooked. I had to know what it was, and when he told me it was the theme song to Flash Gordon, I went wild. I’d seen the posters and I knew that Flash Gordon was one of the things that inspired Star Wars. There was coverage in Starlog that made the film look amazing, and then I heard that theme song and it was over. That’s all it took.

By the time I got to Memphis for Christmas break, both movies were already playing, and I got to see them on back-to-back days. My grandmother Ruby spoiled me rotten, and she told me that she would take me to a different movie every day of the vacation, and she did. Sort of. Because I made her take me to Flash Gordon twice. I managed to see Popeye more than once as well, although that second viewing was back home in Chattanooga. This was an era when I would see films in theaters over and over, in part because they would play for a much longer run, giving me many more opportunities, and also because I was trying to understand the impact they were having on me. I wanted to know why I loved what I loved.

Both films hit me hard on those first viewings. Both films impressed me as whole worlds created by these filmmakers. Both of them had soundtracks that I immediately wanted to play over and over. They expanded the palette of what you could do onscreen, and they left me buzzed. They weren’t the only films we saw that holiday season, either. We saw Stir Crazy, which played like a blockbuster to the audience we saw it with. I remember wanting to like it more than actually liking it, and being fascinated by the way people were belly-laughing at stuff I didn’t think was funny at all. We saw 9 to 5, and that damn near burned the theater down. My parents lost their minds for the movie, and even though I didn’t get a lot of it, I liked the movie’s energy and attitude and I was determined to decode why it made adults laugh so hard. Foul Play had been a big hit with my family a few years earlier, and for us, Seems Like Old Times was family destination entertainment. Not only were those movies we bonded over in theaters, but then again at home over and over.