The Final Countdown – Europe – 1986
There was a good period of time when I was a kid, that I thought The Final Countdown was the coolest song ever recorded. Thirty years later, big hair and tight leather pants aside… it’s still pretty hard to argue against it.
This song reminds me of evenings playing pool and board games in the local kids’ club. The first time I played air guitar was to the solo in The Final Countdown, and you always have a soft spot for your first one.
I liked a lot of Europe’s music, but other than this song – which was one of the biggest singles released in 1986 – they never really made much of an impression on the charts. Europe was a greatly underappreciated hard rock band, but they existed in a genre that was quite crowded in the late eighties and unfortunately for them, Bon Jovi, Metallica, and Guns N’ Roses took the lion’s share of the attention.
Actually, The Final Countdown is really a sparse song with very little to it. There are not many words, and what there is is unimaginative and meaningless. Usually a song will hook you with the chorus, but here the chorus is almost non-existent, so the hook comes from the intro and that memorable rhythm. Thankfully, that has stood the test of time, and The Final Countdown is as cool now as it ever was.
Sometimes your fourth grade English teacher will look through the laundry list of acceptable books to be studied and pull out a clunker – and I’ve certainly had that experience – but occasionally the education system will throw you a bone and you’ll be tasked to read one of the all-time classics, like Of Mice and Men. Thankfully, I had that experience too.
I love horror but it’s a genre that I find myself falling out of love with quite often. Many times it seems that even those producing it are aware of how silly it can be, so they forget to scare the audience and try to make the viewers laugh instead, and if even the filmmakers aren’t going to take it seriously, why should I suspend my disbelief for their work?
Have I finished the penultimate chapter? Yes. I am now fully embroiled in knocking in that final nail, and I know where and how the story finishes, so that’s all good. The word count has crept over 80,000, and I still expect to add another three or four thousand to that number, so it’s all going very much to plan… except, it really isn’t.
I went into The Stepford Wives thinking a couple of things: firstly, that it was a straight up horror story (it’s not – it actually has its tongue firmly in its cheek); and secondly, that it would be at least a little longer than it turned out to be. As it is, it’s about as short as it could be and still be called a novel.
Now let me say this from the start – Dynasty is not on this list because I really liked the show; it’s on this list because it was a big part of my childhood. You have to remember that when I was growing up, there were only four channels – in fact, when Dynasty started there were only three – so people were not as fussy about what they watched back then.
There are not many movies – if any – that I have seen more often than Rocky IV. Did I have a bit of a man-crush on Sylvester Stallone when I was a kid? Yeah, probably. I have fond memories of my ten year old self pretending to be Balboa on my bed. I would sing 
Rocky IV is far and away the most extravagant movie in the series. It is pure entertainment with only the faintest whiff of a story holding it together. Ivan Drago is the big, bad Russian, so there’s an east versus west thing going on, but that’s very much of the time and feels very dated now. Besides, it’s not subtle in the slightest. But if you don’t take this as a serious boxing simulator, you’ll have a lot of fun with Rocky IV.
Most of the running time – which at ninety minutes is the briefest of the entire franchise – is a series of montages played out against the (admittedly, rather good) soundtrack, with plot developments happening in between. There are a lot of flashing lights; a lot of glitz and glamour. In fact, it’s a shame that Apollo Creed – one of the series’ most beloved characters – had to lose his life in this superficial entry. Oh yeah, spoiler alert, I guess. But come on folks, you’re thirty years late to the party!
-- Purveyor of Imagination -- 