Fun looking backwards to BLWiT. Unremarkable songs including "I Will Always Love You". An unremarked on song and dance from Charles Durning that became really relevant in 2016 and remains so. And Dolly? All these years later? An American treasure.
Interesting subject to compile. John Denver had success in "Oh, God!". Dolly Parton had a great debut in "9 to 5", but didn't do so well afterwards. The Village People didn't fare so well in "Can't Stop the Music". Olivia Newton-John had a legendary relationship with John Travolta in "Grease", but dropped way down in "Xanadu" and "Two of a Kind".
Good subject to look into: the practice, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, of putting popular musicians in full-blown Hollywood movies, frequently in starring roles. Surprisingly, they overlooked CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC (starring the Village People) and ROADIE (with Meat Loaf AND Alice Cooper) but this is understandable since both films premiered during the hiatus WTTW imposed on the program during the summer of 1980. The hiatus did NOT preclude the two critics from reviewing the films in print. My mom would disagree with them on THE BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE IN TEXAS (which itself is a guilty pleasure of mine) but at least they didn't make a full-blown parody of the musical devoted to panning the film and at least they sure as hell didn't make an entire soundtrack album out of said parody (talking to you, Doug Walker!) Of the other individual movies in the compilation, ONE-TRICK PONY and GOIN' COCONUTS have been tough to find on home video for the longest time, and THE JAZZ SINGER (the Neil Diamond version thereof) became one of the first winners of a Golden Raspberry Award but the soundtrack did well and spawned one of its star's most well-known songs, "America."
I think they were too hard on The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Wasn't a great movie, but good light entertainment, and there wasn't really that much nudity in the movie as they led you to believe. Most of the nudity was just male butts in the locker room scene, and just flashes of female topless nudity very briefly. It wasn't like Porky's or other R rated nudity filled movies of that time. They make it sound like it was an exploitable skin flick, which it was not.
Yeah. Not sure where they were coming from. I have always loved this flick... i remember my grandmother loved this flick and would cackle like a crazy person watching it. Lots of memorable songs.... burt and dolly made sparks. The boys missed it here.
