Please read Adult Eyes before reading this entry:

I just finished watching Xanadu with my adult eyes. It’s not nearly as bad as I was worried that it would be. The corn factor wasn’t as high as I expected. I found it amazingly entertaining considering it’s twenty-four years old.

I used to think that Flashdance was the first breakdancing that I ever saw, but I was wrong. The breakdancers at the end of Xanadu that are dressed in swinging twenties zoot suits weren’t the focus of the movie, but they are a first for me. I didn’t even notice that I saw breakdancing a full five years before I thought I did.

I didn’t even remember the Disneyesque music montage to “Don’t Walk Away.” First they are tiny little people in a red rose, then they turn into gold fish, then they turn into birds and finally they turn into tiny little people in a rosebud again. Did you notice that the bird was wearing leg warmers?

I did remember the shopping montage to the song “All Over The World.” If you ask me, Gene Kelly was dressed better before they went shopping. I liked the dancing mannequins, though. That punked out hair didn’t really hit the big time until Pink showed up on the scene with “There You Go” a full twenty years later.

Wow, that was so totally NOT Andy Gibb. I don’t know what happened to my eleven year old brain to mix those two guys up, but I was totally wrong. Even though I read the credits and knew that Sonny’s part was played by an actor named Michael Beck, I thought that maybe Andy Gibb had been working under a pseudonym or something. Maybe they didn’t want another Peter Frampton episode, so they made him change his name. That’s what I thought before the first scene of the movie. I don’t know how I mixed that one up in my head.

I could sing almost all of the songs word for word, beginning to end. I think I’ve only seen the movie once or maybe twice, but I listened to the Xanadu Soundtrack at least a million times. “Whenever You’re Away From Me” came back to me so clearly that I could sing every word, even though I couldn’t have named the song before the movie started. God, I wish I could have danced with Gene Kelly. Olivia Newton-John was the luckiest girl of 1980.

Tomorrow, I need to return the movie to my engineer, but never fear. I’ve ordered the movie at the library on DVD. Maybe there will be some cool special features and I can obsess about it even more. I’m so glad that I didn’t get disappointed. Sure, it was a typical 1980’s type of movie. It was the epitome of the 80’s, but any movie that shows me Gene Kelly dancing, singing, roller skating and pretending to play the clarinet is totally worth the ride!