I want you to know that I haven't been spending all of my time while recovering from my surgery watching "good" movies, such as those I'm covering in my other blog. I've done some reading, of course, and even prepared a bit in advance for my summer school class that begins next week. I've also been watching some movies at home just for fun.
The most recent travesty that I watched is a 1979 film called Roller Boogie. It stars Linda Blair as Terry Barkley, a rich girl who's leaving at the end of the summer to study classical music at Julliard. She meets Bobby James, a roller skater, on the boardwalk in Venice Beach and falls in love with him. Well, eventually, she does. You know that one of them has to dislike the other at first or, at least, pretend to. Bobby is played by Jim Bray, who was an actual national roller skating champion. He is an excellent skater, to be sure, but he stinks as an actor. I can't even say that he's particularly attractive either, given how incredibly skinny he is, but I guess that was a look that was popular at the time. Then again, I guess he's as good of an actor as Linda Blair is a skater.
About halfway through the movie, there's a bizarre twist involving some real estate developers who want to take over the local roller disco so they can tear it down. And, of course, that's right before the big roller disco contest that Terry and Bobby want to win. You know how this ends, don't you? The rink is saved, thanks to a fortuitous cassette tape, and Terry and Bobby do indeed win the contest (although their routine is really the weakest of any of them shown). Shockingly, though, the film doesn't end with them skating off into the Venice sunset together. No, Terry goes off to New York after all, leaving Bobby and their trophy behind. He has to skate off into the sunset with his buddies.
This is all silly junk, of course, and I loved every minute of it. One of my guilty pleasures is rewatching those movies that I enjoyed so much as a teenager. That's why I own the DVDs of The Pirate Movie (Kristy McNichol sings! So does Christopher Atkins!) and Xanadu (Olivia Newton-John skates!) and Can't Stop the Music (the Village People and Bruce Jenner act! Awfully!). All of them are signs of the impending apocalypse, certainly, but they are still just as spellbinding to me now as they were almost (gulp!) thirty years ago.
Roller Boogie holds a special place in my heart, though, because it's a movie about roller skating (and it came out before Xanada, so hold your comments). I don't suppose lots of people know that I loved roller skating when I was a teenager. And I was pretty good at it too. There's a shelf of trophies in the bedroom closet as proof. (No, you can't see them.) I've not skated too much as an adult, thanks to an unfortunate shift in my center of gravity, but I used to be able to do a lot of stuff like jumps and spins and other tricks. And it's good exercise too, especially for the legs and, well, you know... When I was in high school, almost everyone skated. It was a weekend ritual for some of us. I used to go almost every night that the rink was open, sometimes four or five times in a week.
As an aside, there are some songs that will forever remind me of roller skating. One is "Lady" by the Little River Band. That's the song that was playing the first time I walked into the rink in Red Bay, Alabama (Redmont Skateland, for the record). Another is "Do You Wanna Touch" by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. That song was so popular at my home rink that we begged the DJ to play it five times in a row one night, and he complied. Roller skating introduced me to Prince ("I Wanna Be Your Lover") and Lakeside ("Fantastic Voyage") and Carl Carlton ("She's a Bad Mama Jama") and so many other funk and soul and R&B artists. I'd love to find some reissues of the songs that we skated to back in those days, but not even iTunes seems to have them.
Given my love of roller skating, is it any wonder that I went to see Roller Boogie in the theaters when it was released? And then watched it again when it premiered on HBO? And went to a friend's house to see it when it came out on VHS? And have ordered the DVD version of it?
So where's the great injustice, you ask? I'm getting to that.
There was another movie about roller disco that came out in 1979: Skatetown U.S.A. It had a more famous cast: Scott Baio, Maureen McCormick, Ruth Buzzi (!), Flip Wilson, and in his first movie role, Patrick Swayze. The "stars" were two people who never went on to great fame or long movie careers: Greg Bradford and Kelly Lang (who is a star of the daytime soap The Bold and the Beautiful, however). Bradford was Hollywood's "It Boy" for a while there, being the perfect embodiment of the blond California surfer type. The plot is silly, naturally, your basic Romeo-and-Juliet rip-off and then something about a roller disco contest. (Were there always roller disco contests in these movies?) And there's "good" guys and "bad" guys. Swayze was the leader of the bad guys, all leather and shirtless vests and such. Heady stuff.
The problem is this movie isn't available to be seen any longer. It's not on DVD and I don't think I've ever seen it on VHS either. More's the pity. Everyone should have a chance to see what all the fuss was about back in the late 1970s. I'd love to watch it again, just to relive for a little while some memories of that time in my life.
Someone get to work on this immediately. If we can have Roller Boogie on DVD, we should have Skatetown U.S.A. as well. You can buy a reproduction movie poster of Skatetown U.S.A., but not the actual movie. There is no justice in this world so long as that remains the case.
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