Breakin’ (1984)

Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (Also 1984)

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I can’t help but love ‘em.  Fad movies never fail to completely fail to capture an era, but they’re gorgeous snapshots of an era’s pop-culture misconceptions that we all like better anyway.  Here, the starry-eyed optimism makes it totally easy get behind Shabba-Doo and Boogaloo Shrimp in their battles against the man.  I just used the word “totally”; do you see how contagious this crap is?

 

Ask any fiftyish person what he did from 1982 to 1985 and he’ll say, “I tried like hell to be a breakdancer, sustained many injuries because I had no physical acuity to speak of, and finally destroyed three years of family photo albums while crying bitter tears of shame”.  If he doesn’t, step on his foot and call him a liar because everybody did.  And since it was a fad that made white people look ridiculous, the cinema landscape was lousy with movies about it.  I think these two are my favorites because they’re the decade at its most innocent.  While flicks like Beat Street tried to be gritty, here evil is limited to evil acts of breakdancing and the manliest thing you can do is dress as if confused about your sexuality.

 

I don’t have to go into the plot for either movie since you could edit these babies into full-on genre spoofs with fifteen minutes and six jokes.  In Breakin’, a rich unsatisfied white girl casts off her life of privilege in favor of the realness of the streets, yet achieves fame and fortune anyway.  Electric Boogaloo sees a community youth center about to be demolished by an evil land developer and only the combined power of friendship and breakdancing can save the day.  Both films carry a message of individuality, loyalty to your real friends, and not letting the man get you down.

 

Holy shit.  Watching these in succession is freebasing premium-grade cliché.

 

Kelly is a Jennifer Beals-esque jazz dancer who dreams of something more fulfilling than fabulous wealth and personal success.  Happy to show the way are Turbo and Ozone, a pair of uber-legit street dancers with hearts of gold (Ice-T is in both of these too but I’d guess asking him about it is a bad idea).  ‘Shabba-Doo’ Quinones and ‘Boogaloo Shrimp’ Chambers play Turbo and Ozone, who I mention because their professional names were so awesome they had to be toned down in a movie about evil breakdancers.  That’s impressive.

 

These guys are real-world dancers and nothing even close to real-world actors, but that’s cool.  Laurence Olivier couldn’t have squeezed anything out of dialog this bad and we’re only here for the fresher than fresh poppin’ and lockin’ anyway.  And the music.  And hundred-pound boom boxes, spiked wristbands, hot pink dancer’s pants with leg warmers, banal street lingo, an ensemble cast of non-threatening minorities, training montages, dancin' on the ceiling, levitating brooms, a climactic dance show that resolves everything, extreme states of realness, and trippindicular break beats.  You know, the good things in life.

 

I ain’t gonna lie, Breakin’ and Electric Boogaloo are full-frontal fluff.  They exist in a gentle world where gang fights are dance-offs and the bad guy’s evil is established by his refusal to say “please”.  Hell, there haven’t been this many primary colors in one place since Sesame Street hosted a pride parade.  But it’s a happier, simpler world that’s easy to get caught up in, and when Ozone tells you “With a little work you’ll be poppin’ and lockin’ and breakin’ in no time”, you can’t help but believe him.

 

If that’s too cornball to serve as a recommendation, I’ve still got this for you.  Show this screenshot to your dad and watch him deny that he tried like hell to be just this cool…