I’m So Excited: The Summer of 1982

Ah… 1982… The year I saw my grandfather cry at the plight of an ugly brown alien. We did not go to the movies with my mother’s father (aka Daddy Fred) often – in fact, this is the only time I remember. It was in a packed house watching E.T. that I happened to turn to my left and witness at least one tear roll down his cheek during the good-bye scene.

In fact all summer was pretty crazy for movies in 1982, here is just a sampling of the releases:
June 4 – Poltergeist and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn
June 11 – E.T. and Grease 2
June 25 – Blade Runner and The Thing (and Megaforce)
July 2 – The Secret of NIMH
July 9 – Tron
Aug 13 – Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Friday the 13th Part III
Aug 20 – The Beastmaster and Class of 1984
And those are only the films that I consider important – for instance it doesn’t include An Officer and a Gentleman. Also a solid set of double features TBH – maybe a good Brattle series for the summer of 2022.

For music it was similarly stacked and all over the place. In fact, it was so crazy that I’ve made two playlists for this summer: one with my personal ‘mixtape’ of songs and the other just featuring songs that entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart that summer… a list that I’ve narrowed down from over 8 hours of songs!

Please bear witness below… Oh, and if you have another 7 minutes to spare, check out the first track from The Time’s almost-ready-for-greatness album What Time Is It? It was just too long to include here.

And here is the epic, five-and-a-half hour, immerse-yourself-in-1982 mega-playlist complete with certified classics, weirdo one-hit wonders, smooth saxophone, hard rock ballads, the tail-end of disco, the popular emergence of rap and new wave, and a bunch of songs that sounds like the theme to an 80s sitcom but aren’t (I’m looking at you Sylvia)…