The Legend of Billie Jean (1985) - foreshadowing of social media?

I watched this for the first time in forever a couple weeks ago. I forgot how kinda good it was. I have vivid memories of watching it as a kid, and likely hadn't seen it in several decades.

For those who haven't seen it, it's really solid. About Bilie Jean and her brother (Binx) and he gets into it with some local rich(ish) kids and they steal and destroy his scooter. When BJ goes to the kid's dad (Pyatt) to get money to fix the scooter, he tries to sexually assault her and Binx ends up shooting Pyatt and they go on the run. And the whole thing blows up into a news sensation, and kids from all over rise up and take her side and defend her. And Pyatt even tries his best to make money off of her any way he can, including selling pics taken of her by her son and his buddies while she was swimming.

It's almost as good as I remember it being. It's a tight little story and is acted pretty well. And Invincible by Pat Benatar works well as sort of the anthem of the movie.

But one thing stood out to me this time around. This movie was sort of a precursor to what social media has become. BJ's "legend" grew and grew mainly via word of mouth and the local news. And then once she made that response video to Mr. Pyatt, it blew up all over the national news and made her basically an overnight celebrity of sorts. Imagine something like that happening nowadays and how huge it would get in a very short period of time. Obviously unintentional, but it seems to perfectly encapsulate the idea of "going viral" on social media, and on the back end of it does the same for how quickly something can fade away and not "be a thing" anymore.

Binx is a young Christian Slater. Yeardly Smith (voice of Lisa Simpson) is Putter. And it's funny seeing Hubie Pyatt played by Barry Tubb who was Wolfman in Top Gun (which was only a year later). Hell, it even has Peter Coyote (the agent from E.T.).

Helen Slater is looking big time good too (relax, she is 21 or 22 when it was made):









I wasn't a fan of the short hair, but she still looked pretty good with it:




Anyway, it's worth a watch if you've never seen it. It has a great 80s vibe to it and is an entertaining little 90 minutes.