Our Favorite Summers: 1986
Filed under: Fandom, Summer Movies
The summer of 1986 is memorable to me as a time of intense highs, and sad, sorry lows. The highs: Hands Across America, the reopening of the refurbished Statue of Liberty, Greg LeMond winning the Tour de France, and the videos for Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach" and Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer." Intel introduced the 386 processor. Gas was 89 cents a gallon, and Pee-Wee's Playhouse made for great, hungover Saturday morning TV.
The lows: Ronald Reagan was President. Peter Cetera, Klymaxx and Survivor got seemingly endless radio play. Kids were entranced with those creepy Cabbage Patch Kids, and that even creepier Teddy Ruxpin. Ronald Reagan was President. Benny Goodman, Vincente Minnelli and Ted Knight died. And Ronald Reagan was President.
Summer movies ran a similar gamut, from the resplendent to the abysmal. To wit:
May 23: Memorial Day weekend, not yet considered a tentpole release date, kicked off the summer with the dreadful Sylvester Stallone action flick Cobra, opposite the anemic Poltergeist 2: The Other Side. Which was just as well, as audiences were still piling in to see Top Gun, which had been released the weekend before.
May 30: A pathetic day in movie release history, as audiences had to choose between Thunder Run, starring Forrest Tucker and John Ireland (total take for entire box office run: $145,975) and the tepid Indiana Jones imitator Jake Speed. Hey ... the stupendous success of Top Gun is really starting to make sense now, isn't it?
June 6: It looks like this is where studios thought that summer truly began -- Arnold Schwarzenegger delivered his own brand of two-fisted justice in Raw Deal, while Spacecamp offered the ludicrous notion that Kate Capshaw would be a better actress if she was accidentally launched into space with a bunch of kids. Also in theaters: the My Little Pony movie for the young 'uns, and Tobe Hooper's criminally underappreciated Invaders From Mars.
June 11-13: Paramount went with an unconventional mid-week release for Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but it still lagged behind the Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School at the weekend's box office. Mainstream audiences could also check out Marshall Brickman's The Manhattan Project, while the arthouse crowd got Neil Jordan's viciously elegant Mona Lisa, and the oddball Armand Assante flick Belazaire the Cajun.
June 18-20: The mid-week release was Ivan Reitman's dumb Robert Redford/Debra Winger/Daryl Hannah project Legal Eagles, with The Karate Kid, Part II hitting theaters on Friday and smoking the box office -- it made $9,500 per theater (and that's 1986 money), and remained the number one film for four weeks straight.
June 27: Labyrinth. Labyrinth. Labyrinth! Oh, it pretty much bombed at the box office, opening at number eight and then dropping off the charts entirely the next week. But ... Labyrinth! Its competition? A B-movie starring gymnast Mitch Gaylord, titled American Anthem. Pffft.
June 27: You wanna sum up the 1980s in two movies, both released on the same day? Try Peter Hyam's Running Scared (the Billy Crystal/Gregory Hines buddy picture) and the insane comedy Ruthless People, from Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers. Imagine both of these playing, along with Karate Kid II and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, at your local multiplex. Now picture yourself with really big hair and shoulder pads. Yep ... that was the 80's in a nutshell.
July 1: A grand week to be alive -- Big Trouble in Little China was released, confused everyone who saw it, and sank at the box office, earning a total of just $11 million against its $25 million budget. Also in theaters this weekend was the Rob Lowe/Demi Moore vehicle About Last Night..., based on a play by David Mamet. No, I'm not making that up.
July 2: Prince continued to be everywhere you turned with Under the Cherry Moon, kids got The Great Mouse Detective, and horror fans were disappointed by Psycho III. And yet, Big Trouble still tanked. Hmm.
July 11: Most of the cast of SCTV proved that they could, indeed, make a really crappy movie if it included Robin Williams -- Club Paradise was released. And it still did better per-theater business than Big Trouble.
July 18: Aliens arrived, and demolished every other movie in theaters. So much so that we don't even remember that the weekend's other release, Vamp (starring the unlikely trio of Chris Makepeace, Gedde Watanabe, and Grace Jones) ever existed.
July 25: Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner tested our love with Haunted Honeymoon, while Stephen King tested our patience with his Duel ripoff, Maximum Overdrive. Also, Nora Ephron's Heartburn came out, beginning a reign of terror that continued for decades.
July 30: Ticket-buyers sadly trudged to theaters and settled for either Flight of the Navigator or the Tom Hanks-Jackie Gleason abomination Nothing in Common. Grown men wept.
August 1: Howard the Duck was released, and immediately became a cultural touchstone. Also in theaters, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, and if you can remember how this differed from the others in the series, you're a far better horror fan than me.
August 8: A big, big weekend. America started to fall in love with John Cusack with the release of One Crazy Summer, the first really great Stephen King adaptation hit theaters with Stand by Me, Ted Danson proved that he and Howie Mandel aren't movie stars with A Fine Mess, Spike Lee caught our attention with his debut film, the super-low-budget She's Gotta Have It, and the first, bad Transformers movie came out (not to be confused with the later bad Transformers movies).
August 15: One of the best weekends of the summer -- David Cronenberg's The Fly in theaters, up against Michael Mann's Manhunter. Well, and John Candy in Armed and Dangerous. And Michael O'Keefe with Paul Rodriguez in something called The Whoopee Boys. But still ... The Fly! And Manhunter!
August 22: And then studios dumped whatever they had left in theaters. Night of the Creeps. Michael Keaton in Touch and Go. Farrah Fawcett being terrorized in Extremities. A skateboard movie called Thrashin'. And Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, which did very well against that competition, unsurprisingly.
August 30: And we closed out Summer 1986 with ... Madonna and Sean Penn in Shanghai Surprise. Ah, well. We were all pretty much done with summer by then, anyway. And wondering if we shouldn't have give Big Trouble in Little China another shot.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-22-2009 @ 7:36AM
duane vibert said...
Most of the movies that bombed at the theatre, ie. Ferris' Bueller's Day off, Flight of the Navigator, are two of my all time most favorite movies. I've seen both of these movies at least a dozen times, if not more. Great movies. Never saw the rest of these movies & probably never will.
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6-22-2009 @ 4:55PM
JavaJunkie said...
"Bombed at the theater"?? Ferris Bueller was a big hit that summer.
6-22-2009 @ 8:49AM
techstar25 said...
I remember seeing Karate Kid II, Labyrinth, and Transformers in the theaters. I was 9 years old, so getting out to three movies in one summer was actually a lot.
I really got into Karate Kid II. I think we can all that to this day it remains one of the best sequels of all time.
Loved Labyrinth even at 9 years old, and like everyone my age, I still love it to this day.
I pretty much forgot the plot of Transformers ten minutes after seeing it, but that didn't stop me from wanting the toys for Christmas, and then 23 years later owning a VHS copy, a DVD Special Edition, and the UK import Blu-Ray disc. ;)
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6-22-2009 @ 9:24AM
HelloJackToad said...
I can't believe Labyrinth bombed. It's one of my feelgood choices.
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6-22-2009 @ 9:48AM
Pixls said...
wow! me being young and all, i grew up watching labyrinth on VHS, i love that movie SO much! i must have seen it a million times. nothing beats jim henson, and david bowie is just as good!
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6-22-2009 @ 10:32AM
Chris said...
Big Trouble in Little China was waaay ahead of it's time. I can see why it failed at the BO. Release it now with a comparable budget I think it would do a lot better.
Also:
Obviously you hate Reagan. Thanks for being a another lib "journalist" injecting their BS commentary in an article that has nothing to do with politics. Lame.
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6-22-2009 @ 12:06PM
Richard Ott said...
My favorite movie of 1986? It could've been Spider-Man,
had it been released in the Summer or Winter of that
year as originally planned after NBC's run of Spiderman
& His Amazing Friends, but that version never came out.
I was still into robots like Star Wars' R2-D2 at this time,
and Short Circuit was my next big thing, a great movie.
"No, no disassemble, No Disassemble Number 5!"
If the remake of Short Circuit is successful enough, I'd
love to see a Wall-E 2 come out of this. If not, I'll settle
for another Star Wars Trilogy, Episodes VII, VIII & IX.
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6-22-2009 @ 1:02PM
Dan said...
I LOVE Labrynith and Big Trouble! Night of The Creeps is a pretty hilarious, campy, kinda horror movie too, though Monster Squad is still better. Good thing Labrynith and Big Trouble went on to get something like cult status...people didn't know what they were missing!
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6-22-2009 @ 1:04PM
taalibba said...
They had already released 6 friday the thirteenth movies by '86?! And yet we got another one this year. Someone please explain to me why this franchise still hasn't died?
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6-22-2009 @ 2:43PM
Brian said...
How about an iconic villain to guarantee an audience and a low budget to guarantee a profit? Not too tough to crack that one.
6-22-2009 @ 3:16PM
Jim said...
Yeah, it was sooooooo awful that Reagan was president. You do realize that historians rank him in the top 10 greatest presidents. Don't let partisanship blind you to not recognizing the positive achievements of those how don't see everything the same way you do. And also, consider the alternative- a second Carter term -nice guy, but over his head. A Mondale presidency is not worth speculating because I have no idea how/what he would have done.
As for Movies- it was all about Top Gun, Ferris Bueller, and Aliens. No one started getting the camp subtext in Top Gun until later. I never cared for Labyrinth; my father and I walked out and watched Back to School instead. Cobra was better than Raw Deal; Raw Deal has to be my least favorite Schwarzenegger flick by far, that movie reeked.
I had the biggest crush on Lea Thompson and kept trying to convince myself that Howard the Duck didn't suck, but it did... live a Hoover.
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6-22-2009 @ 6:27PM
gottacook said...
"Nora Ephron's Heartburn" implies that she was the director, but she wasn't directing movies yet in 1986; Mike Nichols was responsible for that one. (Ephron scripted from her own novel of the same title, but the novel's much better - go seek it out. It's the kind of book that can be read and enjoyed very quickly, much like Charles Webb's The Graduate. Also, as a roman-a-clef it's truer to her own life than the movie is.)
I saw both Big Trouble in Little China and The Fly that summer in theaters - and proudly own the DVD of the first one (we only buy $4-$5 DVDs).
Also, although I agree that political argument doesn't belong here, anyone who believes the Reagan presidency was good for this country had better do a little research.
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6-23-2009 @ 5:03PM
kitty said...
After The Messiah gets finished "fixing" the economy, you're going to be on your hands and knees wishing for a president like Ronald Reagan.
BTW, why IS it that libs feel compelled to inject their politics into every discussion -- is their world so cloistered that they honestly feel that everyone thinks as they do.
If you're part of the Hollywood crowd, that's likely a safe bet. Diversity of opinion is not tolerated in H-wood.
The assumption that we all think alike is part of the reason I attend about one movie a year. Also, the need to lecture and harangue instead of entertain - that's another good reason to abstain.
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6-22-2009 @ 11:16PM
matchbox1966 said...
Political commentary? well since you brought it up...
- 89 cent gas ??
- American coming back strong and finding itself after the abysmal Carter years ??
- fall of Communism ??
you gotta love it... unless you're a communist.
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6-28-2009 @ 10:02PM
ff126 said...
What is wrong with Peter Cetera????
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9-13-2009 @ 1:39AM
Konrad said...
Bette Midler's, Ruthless People and John Candy's, Armed and Dangerous will always be my all time favorite comedy movies. None of the so called comedys they make now can even hold a candle. Of course, that is just my opinion but the only one that matters, I might add. And another thing I might add, I LOVED RONALD REAGAN!!!!!!
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