1986

Movies, Music, and TV

The number one movie for the year was Top Gun in which Tom Cruise plays the fighter pilot Maverick in amazing jet fighter scenes.  I thought it was good, but I liked the number two film Crocodile Dundee better with its adventure, comedy and action in the outback of Australia.  After the success of the first one, The Karate Kid Part II came out which was good but not as good as the first one.   Ferris Bueller's Day Off was just a good fun movie about a high school senior Ferris Bueller who fakes illness to stay home from school when his parents are away and then takes his father’s Ferrari 25 GT Spyder on a day trip of adventures.

Several science fiction movies premiered. There was Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home which continued the story from Star Trek III which the reincarnated Spock returns to his home world but first the crew must travel back in time to find, a then extinct, humpback whale in order to save the world.  A bit corny and the crew looked ever so much older.  Suspenseful and a bit scary, I really liked Aliens with Sigourney Weaver in the role of Ellen Ripley who manages to defeat unstoppable Aliens who drip acid from their mouths and lay their eggs in the bodies of humans.  A remake of the 1958 The Fly came out but was not as good as the original.

I enjoyed  the adventure comedy Big Trouble in Little China in which Kurt Russel plays Jack Burton who rescues the woman with green eyes from an ancient sorcerer.  

After reading all three of the books, I was disappointed the movie The Clan of the Cave Bear with the beautiful, but much too skinny, Daryl Hannah playing the homo sapiens girl Ayla who is raised by the Cave Bear Clan of Neanderthals. 

Music

There wasn’t much in new music that I liked in ’86 so much that I bought any albums. The top twenty or so songs were all about love, missing love, wanting love and so on but now that I had Julie and love my interest in such songs waned.

TV

Taking classes two or three nights of the week I didn’t watch as much TV in ’86. The Cosby Show was again the number one show, and I liked it well enough but only watched it occasionally.  I really begin to like Cheers and watched it when I could.  In later years I would go back and watch all the episodes.

A Wedding