Wow...such an awesome picture.

Thanks. I reckon Saruuk will come by and notice you said so too.

ONJ!!

WOOOHOOOOO!!


Xanaduuuuuu~~

According to "The Worst 50 Films Ever Made," it's on the list. I think their summary: "According to one critic: XanaDON'T." But it was like #27 or so, so was in the bottom 25 and not worst 25...

*GASP*

But....but...Olivia...

Funny thing, in the `70s proper, I LOATHED disco. I preferred Peter Frampton, Led Zeppelin, Steely Dan, Alan Parsons Project (I think started in mid 70s), Rick Wakeman, Yes... I listened to "Progressive Rock" radio stations. It wasn't until mid/late 80s when Xanadu first came out that I really liked it a lot, saw it in theaters probably 8 times or more... Took various friends to see it, and I did like ONJ and Gene Kelley. I liked the story. The whole thing was pretty great, and I remember buying the laserdisc for it, which predated DVDs by a decade (maybe less). Huge, heavy silvered disc in a big laser beam player that hooks to the TV (bigger than most component stereo amps) that sounded like a jet engine revving up (almost)... and usually only could play half the movie and you needed to flip the disc to see the other half.

I remember laserdiscs!! HAHAHA...never owned any myself, but definitely remember them being sold :)

And yay for Alan Parsons Project!!

I spent way too much cash on new tech… from computers to audio equipment. I eventually got tired of stereo stuff and just focused on computers at the end. But I even had one of the Pioneer laserdisc players that you didn't need to flip the discs over. It had to spin down the disc however, since there is simply one track per side, in a loooooooong spiral, so when you focus a laser on the opposite side, the way you were spinning the disc to read the initial side from inside to out won't be the right way the flip side spiral is wound. There's so much inertia in a disc that size, it takes like 30 seconds to spin down and spin back up again, total.

I was part of the Halcyon (console) development of RDI Video systems, the developers of Dragon's Lair. They used the old industrial laserdisc players, so I knew a fair amount about them (but never got any leads on discounts for getting myself any cheap). I was hired during and primarily for work on their Thayer's Quest project. You can look up in Wikipedia any of the boldface terms I highlighted there by clicking on them.

very cool stuff :)

I do remember Dragon's Lair...

Yes, and it has Gene Kelley skating, which basically is what Unk is doing here - skating on the Ice of Velious, where the dragon's fire is melting a pattern of the Kunark star behind him, as he teases it into firing near-miss blasts... and you may well just echo the main title theme, "Xanadu" in your head while this goes on...

For it was a stately pleasure dome decreed...

It's considered one of the worst films of its deade, and one of the worst musicals ever. Musicals have always broken the dramatic formula and had their own way of storytelling, so the "show, don't tell" rule just can't be applied. Chances are they just didn't want to shoot more film, so the exposition saved time. Some people, my mother is one of them, like dialogue between characters as opposed to just a lot of action in film.

Kira's reveal is magical - and things have to seem dreamlike, unreal. Since this was well before the time of CGI being very affordable, traditional animation was still the way to go. Anything weird, fantastic, special, morphing between shapes, defying physics - tended to be easier to animate.

Olympia probably is brilliant with energies of the spheres. Wavelengths the eyes cannot see, and some they can barely see. They likely just shaped a bit of reality as best they thought fit the era (being a bit ditzy about paleolithic vs disney 60s) and produced the technicolor puke you got to see. It was probably meant to be a drab color world is us; technicolor puke is like the Oz they live in... vividness upgrade a la Dorothy.

The neon pastels are VERY 80s. Sort of like Fry visiting that retro bar where people are all wearing hoops (circlets) over the points in their hats, and around their skirts, looking very Jetsons 1960s futuristic, and Fry says how cool they are... and they say how NOT cool they are, but they're retro, so in that context, they're cool... Same idea. In its time, all the neon flashiness and swoosh and streaking was quite a highlight to animate on the dancers, very much trying to give one last hurrah to the end of Disco. Xanadu pretty much spelled it out. Disco is dead. All this retro stuff is just not cool anymore. It's faded, blasé, crazy, uncool, jaded, your old man's bag, let's bury it and not speak of it any more.

Pretty scathing review, but quite likely has a point every time. (It was Don Bluth that did that animation, yes.) I sort of give the film the judgmental set I give musicals, which is "leave them alone and just enjoy the songs."Plot, logic, dialog, production values be damned. It's all just a vehicle for tying the music together.