Do you feel the need for speed?
30 years ago this week, moviegoers across America learned that catchphrase for the first time.
In a role that launched Tom Cruise into super stardom, the 1986 action flick about a bunch of hot shot US Navy fight pilots competing in an elite fighter pilot program took the box office by storm, and redefined an entire genre of cinema.
Three decades later the film is still a must-see piece of American pop culture, and its influence is felt in every summer action movie since.
Beautiful women, handsome leading men, fighter jets, shirtless volleyball, memorable one liners, a sizzling 80s soundtrack, all of the tropes needed to create the formulaic action movie for the ages…and it all started on the deck of an American air craft carrier off the coast of California, with Kenny Loggins‘ “Danger Zone” blaring as the soundtrack.
But the movie almost didn’t happen at all, if not for a spur of the moment idea by producer Jerry Bruckheimer.
Bruckheimer was casually flipping through a copy of “California Magazine” while sitting in a waiting room back in May of 1983, when he was struck by a creative epiphany, inspired by an article on the U.S. Navy’s Top Gun school at Naval Air Station Miramar (San Diego, Calif.)
Jerry showed it to his producing partner, the late Don Simpson, and things took off from there….so to speak.
Celebrating its 30th anniversary, the action-packed thrill-ride that is Top Gun was the highest-grossing movie of 1986.
But interestingly enough, it didn’t open as a blockbuster, unlike today’s summer films. Rather, it had legs, meaning it stayed in theaters for an entire year and ultimately earned a worldwide box office of more than $350 million…which translates to over $760 million in 2016 dollars.
Since the film’s success, Bruckheimer has gone on to be a major film producer, his credits have always included summer popcorn fanfare such as ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, ‘The Rock’, ‘Armageddon’…his partner Don Simpson sadly died in 1996 of a drug overdose.
Actors Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer finished the decade of the 80s as two of Hollywood’s most bankable leading men, as Cruise’s star power went straight into the stratosphere soon after.
But no matter how big they’ve gotten, nothing has compared to the magic of the film they all made together back in 1986, and every time someone somewhere is channel surfing their tv or even hears the power ballad “Take My Breath Away” on a mix station, the nostalgia of it all comes roaring back.
Top Gun was the epitome of a generation, of Reagan era Americana, and a film that is a time capsule to an era we wish we could revisit today.
