Ever since I stumbled across that trailer Thursday, I’ve had the movie Heavy Metal on the brain. Not an entirely unpleasant situation, but definitely a little outside my usual obsessions…

Anyway, I tried talking about it to a few of my friends at work and found, much to my surprise, that this movie doesn’t seem to be very well remembered. I didn’t expect the kids in the office to know about it, but even the older guys could only scratch their heads and say they think they saw it and they kind of remember it, but not really. And here I’ve believed all these years that it was a minor touchstone for my generation, not on the level of Star Wars or even Tron, but at least equivalent to Caddyshack. Once again, however, I seem to find myself the Lone Keeper of Obsolete Pop Culture.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised in the case of Heavy Metal. It’s not exactly a great classic, even by “cult classic” standards.

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Today is Pioneer Day, a Utah state holiday commemorating the arrival of the first Mormon settlers here in the Salt Lake Valley. If you’re from around here, you know what it’s all about, but for my out-of-state readers I should explain that this day is basically an end-of-the-month do-over of the Fourth of July: we have a big parade in the morning, then picnics in the park, carnivals, day-long activities for the kids, and finally, fireworks at night. (There are some who grumble, in fact, that Utahns make a bigger deal of our local founder’s day than our nation’s Independence Day and that this indicates there’s some lingering whiff of treason in Mormon culture. Personally, I think folks just like fireworks and parades.) Anyway, most of the state’s population seems to have the day off… but not me. Nope, I work for The Man. Which means I’m sitting at my workstation, same as always, trying not to listen to the drums of the marching band a mere half-block away…

You know, on these hot summer days when responsibilities keep me inside drudging away at my desk instead of out playing as I’d like to be, my mind tends to wander back to my carefree adolescent years, when all I really had to think about was the anticipation of getting my driver’s license and the beguiling, inscrutable mystery of girls. Oh, and of nonsense like this:

That’s actually a trailer for the late-90s home-video release of Heavy Metal, not the original theatrical version from 1981, but as I recall the vintage advertising wasn’t too different. You have no idea how exciting this movie looked to me when I was twelve. An R-rated cartoon? With aliens and starships and rock music and the possibility of… boobies?! It was utterly mind-blowing… and of course, there was no way my mom was going to let me see it, not with that R rating and those danged cartoon boobies. The innuendo in Moonraker had been bad enough. And so it was a long, long time before I would see Heavy Metal in its entirety (I think I was in my twenties before I finally caught it at a midnight screening), and naturally, after all those years of build-up, it turned out to be something of a disappointing mess. Ah, but the images and the music… man, that stuff lives on in my memory as a touchstone of all that was simultaneously cool and tacky about the early ’80s.
Yeah… summer days in 1981…

From somewhere outside my office, I can hear that the parade carries on…

It’s another of those crazy-making weeks that offers little chance to blog (and naturally, these are the weeks when I seem to have the most I want to blog about — this is an immensely frustrating situation, believe me), so to keep you entertained until I manage to actually, you know, write something, allow me to direct your attention to Jaime J. Weinman’s rationalization of how he can call Moonraker the dumbest James Bond movie ever (even over Die Another Day!) and yet still feel a certain affection for it:

…it’s just so very good-natured and unpretentious in its desire to do anything to entertain; it wants you to like it so badly and will do anything to be liked, whether it’s repeating the plot of a movie made two years earlier or turning a psychotic killer into a kid-friendly romantic comedy lead. I can’t help but be a little charmed by a movie that’s so anxious to be loved; today, when a blockbuster movie is bad, it’s just loud and obnoxious, demanding our attention rather than giving us beautiful things to look at. Moonraker is like [director] Lewis Gilbert’s home movies reel of cool stuff [production designer] Ken Adam built; that’s enough to keep it out of Die Another Day purgatory.

For the record, I, too, harbor some warm feelings for Moonraker. It was the first Bond movie I ever saw; my mother took me and a half-dozen of my friends to see it for my tenth birthday. She was mortified by all the innuendo in the dialogue, certain that she would be getting some nasty phone calls from other mothers once my buddies started repeating things we’d heard, but we didn’t care about all that mushy stuff — in those days of the post-Star Wars space-movie craze, we were only there for the shuttles and lasers.

You might also want to check out I Expect You to Die!, an entertaining blog whose proprietor is reviewing one Bond flick a week until the release of the next one, Quantum of Solace, this fall. He’s also doing additional commentary on certain related issues, such as the amusing (and dead-on) observation that the Bond-o-verse invariably presents Americans as bumbling yokels, and yet American audiences love the series anyhow.

I hope to be back later today with some thoughts on last weekend’s concert experience…