re: The 1980s was a decade of very strange high fantasy. Why?

quote:

---

Why?

---

Cocaine is a helleva drug

Tolkien, Dungeon and Dragons and everyone learned mythology in school... All of this were a big influence on fantasy in the eighties...

Also during the 70's anything futuristic fantasy(IE Logan's Run) was apocalyptic due to the cold war and nuclear arms race with the Russians.

quote:

---

Time Bandits is a decent example of my theory - put Terry Gilliam in the director's chair and see what happens.

---

.

A remake of this is a must with today's tech.. it didn't rely on it but it would add such a presence to an underrated cult classic..

Dune, man. The one movie no one has been successful making despite multiple attempts.

I appreciate the obvious answer, LoveThatMoney...but your explanation still doesn't explain why these futuristic movies took place in the distant past.

Most of what you've listed isn't "futuristic." You can make that argument for Star Wars and Dune and that's about it. So your question regarding "futuristic fantasy set in the past" is nonsensical.

But I will give you the answer again to make it get through your thick skull: Hollywood runs in phases. When Star Wars blew up in the late 70s, everyone tried to get in on it. That spun off into direct ripoffs as well as movies that took cues from Star Wars (e.g. incorporating the hero's quest, blatant good versus evil, etc.).

quote:

---

But, again, why were high fantasy movies from a time "long ago" popular in the '80s? What drove their popularity?

---

Part of it was the pendulum swinging back from the "gritty, realistic" films - now that started innocently enough - films like Bonnie and Clyde, Butch and Sundance, Cool Hand Luke and The Wild Bunch - these represented a significant departure from the "Golden Age" of Hollywood. I mean, the Hays Code died with Some Like it Hot, but it took awhile for filmmakers to really stretch their legs with big budget movies. More violence - somewhat darker tone than in the more cheery (overall, obviously there are exceptions) - darker themes, even. You see that even in films like The Graduate and The Last Picture Show as the decade turned over.

By the time we get into the 70s, you had films like The Godfather, Chinatown, and so forth continuing the theme. Now, you had other trends during that time, like the big budget disaster films (Towering Inferno, Poseidon Adventure, to a lesser degree the Airport films), which tried to capture this "negative" vibe, but with the grandeur of the old school Hollywood films (I guess to capitalize on nostalgia).

By the end of the 1970s, of course we endured the disco era (an artificial, cocaine fueled "optimism" to counter the real world doldrums the country/nation was feeling), but even the comedies were kind of "downers" (e.g. Annie Hall), much less post-Vietnam films that were coming out, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, etc.

So, I think the high fantasy (your term) trend in the 1980s, and I might suggest that Back to the Future might fit, overall, although not precisely, as well as the other science fiction comedies (notably Ghostbusters), as a more positive, upbeat reversal of many of the 1970s films which were mostly downers (IMHO.) (And, more to the point, that was easier to accomplish by picking a detached time in the past, particularly the remote past - or at least the story is grounded in the remote past.)

As usual, I'm probably all wrong about this.

It wasn't much longer than your OP, motherfricker.

Kelly Preston will forever be super hot. Her hotness is incredibly underrated.