June 1980 features Travolta, Eastwood, Reynolds, a rowdy Love Bug, and two guys on a mission from God

Plus the film that introduced me to the idea of a "former PLAYBOY Playmate"

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…

JUNE 1980

CNN went on the air for the very first time, beginning the age of the 24-hour-news cycle.
The US brought back the draft. The Mets drafted a young Daryl Strawberry.
David Letterman’s first TV show for NBC premiered in its daily morning time slot.
And finally, in LA, Richard Pryor set himself on fire in an explosion while freebasing cocaine.

Starlog was a science-fiction magazine, devoted to the TV shows and movies that were rapidly becoming my favorites, and my parents seemed perfectly happy with Starlog in the house. The same company published Fangoria, which they decidedly were not fine with, but Starlog? No problem.

It was Starlog that introduced me to the notion of Playboy, though. They published some coverage for a movie called Galaxina, and I can understand why they thought it fit their magazine. It’s a very silly science-fiction spoof. It also stars Dorothy Stratten, who was best known at that point as a Playboy Playmate. I knew we had Playboy in the house, but I hadn’t really paid attention to it. It always kept in my dad’s room, away from my reading stacks, but when I read the Galaxina coverage, I decided I wanted.. nay, needed… to know what a Playboy Playmate was. Oddly, the movie ended up being fairly innocuous by T&A standards, but all it took was Stratten’s casting and that coverage to spark my curiosity. Then biology took over and the magazine became important for its own reasons.

Magazines were a constant topic of debate in my home. One of the most controversial was Mad, which infuriated my father for some reason. I had to go to the public library to read the magazine every month, and I did because I loved it. I loved the movie parodies, which were often my first exposure to movies I couldn’t actually go see. When my dad would find a copy in the house, it would go straight into the trash. When I saw that Mad was releasing a movie, I knew I didn’t stand a chance of seeing it with my parents. I also knew I couldn’t even bring it up to them, and I played my cards just right. I got to go with my friend one Saturday, and our sense of triumph lasted all the way through the moment we actually saw the movie, which was bafflingly terrible even to a bunch of ten-year-olds.

My parents were happy to take us to movies often during the summer, and we saw a ton of things that month. I remember one day when we went to go see Bronco Billy, then got something to eat, then saw Fame in the late afternoon. That was fascinating to me because it was so clear that my dad picked the first film and my mom picked the second. I was starting to tune in to the movie stars or the genres that were important to each of them, and I was curious to understand why. My dad was a giant Clint Eastwood fan, but this was a period when Eastwood was experimenting with his own image, so it wasn’t always clear what we were getting into when we went to see his films. I thought Every Which Way But Loose was goofy, and at that age, goofy seemed just fine to me. Bronco Billy was something totally different, and I wasn’t sure what I thought of it. It made an impression on me, though, and certain scenes stuck with me.

Fame, on the other hand, landed on me hard. I have a theory that kids love watching movies about kids who are a little bit older than they are because it offers them a glimpse of what they’re about to go through. I thought the world of Fame was amazing and I found the film absolutely engrossing. I managed to talk my mom into seeing it a second time with one of my aunts, and they both had an amazing response to it. I was learning that as a habit, seeing something a second time so I could watch someone else react to something. It was a big habit for me, and it probably helps that movie tickets were so cheap.