It was the year of our lord 1980 and the seventies were winding down and the leftovers from this era was being dumped on the unsuspecting public like rejected merchandise left on old Pick N' Save shelves and was going through the pace of being replaced by 1981. Ronald Reagan was ready to roll into the White House and, along for the ride, a tide of staunch conservatism that would make the Moral Majority fashionable for the gullible and as hip as a old MTV video.
Even though I was too young and/or wasn't "deep" enough to notice these cultural and social changes in the air, I did notice something "weird" was going on but I couldn't put my finger on it. I figured this weirdness was caused when Belushi and Akroyd left 'SNL' to make '1941'. What the hell did I know?
During this transitional period, I was stuck in an boring little island within LA called El Segundo. This island was conveniently isolated from the rest of the Hellhounds Of Hollywood; to the north of it's city limits was LAX and it's massive runways; the south had the Chevron oil field (which took up just under half of the town); east was aerospace factories and office buildings (now mostly deserted) AND to the west, separating the city from the beach was a sewage and a power plant.
If you didn't have a car or cash for the bus, you were stuck and mindlessly bored out of your nut. And that was me! Desperate for god knows anything! When my brother visited us back in 1979, I raided this trunk and found his small record collection. I ended up "borrowing" his copy of 'A New World Record' by ELO. This recording was aggressive with it's own individual pop sound and over the top arrangements. It sounded big, loud and elaborate and it was the perfect soundtrack for my pursuits from this blank dead end address (outside of the highlights of the Dr. Demento show).
From here, I picked up on ELO's other titles such as their outlandish pop/rock masterpiece, 'Out Of The Blue' and their 1979 disco orgy, 'Discovery'. I've reached a higher level of ELO worshipping when I joined the ELO Fan Club. Along with the usual membership card and the other useless fanboy paper products, I also got a subscription to their xeroxed newsletter. It was here when I first heard of XANADU.
I suddenly became eager to see this film as I fantasized about seeing the band performing the show tunes on a big-ass movie screen. Hell, nevermind that Olivia Newton-What's-Her-Name chick! Bring on the band, I say!! Of course, this was not to be as, in hind sight, I guess, seeing Olivia on this same big-ass screen was a LOT more pleasurable than watching old English rock musicians lip-syncing.
As Xanadu's opening weekend approached, I started to pick up on anything that wasn't nailed down related to thegilm. Stuff like newspaper clippings, ads from recording industry publications (Billboard, Record World, etc.,), terrorizing local record stores for their XANADU displays and keeping all ears and eyes out for another other chunks of information.
Around a month before that opening day, I heard the ELO single, 'I'm Alive' on Rick Dees old KHJ-AM morning show. THAT kicked me into overdrive! On the very next day, I went to the nearest record store (Westchester Music, R.I.P., of course) and bought the single. Just for the hell of it, I also picked up the other single, Olivia's 'Magic', just to round out the collection though I didn't give the later single much thought at the moment.
I immediately went home and played the hell out of that sucker! Both sides! Possibly to breakout of this rut, I put on the 'Magic' single. Now, up to this point, I was only in it for ELO and the advertising added to the anticipation; the art deco/fantasy look suggested as up-beat snazzy otherworldly experience. Like ELO's sound, it suggested a larger than life aspect to this whole deal.
Priorities kinda shifted soon after playing 'Magic'. Being a hard-core artistic geek, the lyrics of promise ("Building Your Dreams/Has To Start Now/There's No Other Road To Take/I'll Be Guiding You") and the women (actually, the character she was portraying) who was singing it really hit hard on me. Nevermind the Orchestra! Here comes the Babe...I mean, the Muse!
The 'Kira The Muse' character may not have been deep and a bit stiff as the rest of the film but I fell for the whole thing anyway. Since a LOT of the advertising used Olivia's face and voice, this effect was primed for suckers like me. According to what the film stood for, anything can happen at anytime if you put enough effort into it and get it done...providing if you get a nice cute chick to motivate you. Or maybe I'm getting too technical here.
For the rest of this personal story, you'll have to refer to my 'This Xanadu Thing' strip elsewhere in this site.
After years of collecting, researching and writing about this movie, I discovered other little aspects of this film that only a hyper-actively-intelligent and easily bored pop culture fanboy like me (or any ones you see on VH-1) can come up with. For me, Xanadu also mostly represented the last of the Post WW2 pop culture era, or as someone more opinionated and fictional described it as the last American Dream era.
There was an aura of relief, joy and optimism when WW2 was over and this utopian feeling spread thick well into our culture for the next 35 years. Where else would we get irony abuse-free examples like Worlds Fairs, Beatles, Burt Bacharach, James Bond, Space-Age anything, mini-skirts, bell bottoms, Drive-In's, TV variety shows and so on...?
By the time Xanadu showed up on the scene, this era was dieing out along with it's last-ditch effort...'Disco'. And so, this barely-disco film went down with it all and was felt for dead by impatient tastemakers and people who were generally embarrassed by this era, much less the decade of the 70's.
However, the brave few fans refused to even acknowledge the film's supposed funeral and the era it has ended up representing. Two of them met each other in the early 90's through the rambunctious hobby known as 'tape trading' (that's right kiddoes! There was a time when you could freely exchange music and video without being sued for "illegally downloading", and the actual act of downloading meant using snail mail).
Soon after the trading started between these two fellas, (Otis and myself, if you haven't noticed by now), they/we began to find things in common, outside of the mountain of cool & strange stuff we were already trading. Two of which was ELO and XANADU!
From there, they/we butted heads and thought up of ways of honoring this goofy little movie. One idea that was reasonably plausible was taking out a corner of the internet and declare our collective righteous indignation behind Xanadu.
Thanks to my collection and Otis' web know-how, Xanadu Preservation Society was forged in 1997 into the backs of unsuspecting fools and into the fore heads of pop culture junkies everywhere. Soon, other fans were crawling into our radar offering more ammo for the site to blow the minds of what the Church of the Sub-Genius called "the normals".
Regardless, Xanadu has many supporters and their own reasons to continue to endlessly go back to the film; the innocence, the camp, the MST3K-styled enjoyment, and so on. Whatever the slings and arrows come its way or in the face of its flaws, Xanadu will stubbornly continue to endure through it all with its basic message of hope and its own particular brand of "fun".
Or to put it so plainly, as Hunter S. Thompson once said, "Why Not?'
"Why Not", in deed.
Don-O