Coming home tonight after a late evening out, I was thinking about this song:

That’s Pat Benatar’s “Shadows of the Night,” if you don’t know it. I’ve always liked this one; it’s probably my favorite Benatar tune, even though it was one of her lesser hits and seems to be somewhat unknown these days (at least, I rarely hear it out there in the world; whenever the oldies station — sigh — plays a Benatar song, it’s almost invariably either “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” or “Love Is a Battlefield”). I groove on its combination of romantic melody and rock ‘n’ roll bombast, I guess. I vaguely remembered the video showed her in a cockpit singing into an old-fashioned microphone, but wow, it turns out to be quite the little epic, doesn’t it?

A couple of thoughts:

• I don’t know what kind of planes are featured in Pat’s daydream, but they’re not P-51 Mustangs, as shown on that poster she’s looking at in the framing scenes.
• This was made in 1982, the year after Raiders of the Lost Ark came out. Could the Nazi theme have possibly been inspired by Raiders‘ success? It seem like there were a lot of Nazis and 1930s/1940s things in pop culture around that time, but did Raiders begin that or was it merely another example of the same zeitgeist?
• Did you catch Judge Reinhold and Bill Paxton as the pilot in the red cap and the Nazi radio operator, respectively?
• And finally, is it just me or are women in 1940s-style flying gear damn sexy? Maybe it’s me…