1987

Movies, TV, and Music

There were several notable movies for me in ’87.  I went and saw Good Morning, Vietnam, starring Robin Williams who was his usual great comic self and the movie made me glad I didn’t get drafted and go to Vietnam. Two very dramatic films set in China came out that I really enjoyed, Empire of the Sun and The Last Emperor. The James Bond movie The Living Daylights with Timothy Dalton playing James Bond for the first time who did not that good of a Bond.  The Bond girl,  Maryam d'Abo,  was the girlfriend of the bad guy but of course James Bond gains her trust and, in the end, helps Bond. The Princess Bride came out and I liked it.  Overboard with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell was just a good fun comedy and I always liked Goldie.  The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman with Lee Majors, Lindsay Wagner from their rolls in their respective TV shows was kind of dumb but probably won an award for the longest title. The science fiction movie RoboCop about a part man, part machine policeman had an interesting premise but was sort of tacky.  

The action packed science fiction movie Predator with Arnold Schwarzenegger fighting an alien monster was compared to the movie Alien and there was a debate as to which monster was the worst and which would win in a fight.  It would be another twenty years before we would know the answer.   Interesting enough I enjoyed Dirty Dancing with Patrick Swayze, Jennifer Grey. A number of years later I would visit the place where the movie was made.  

TV

The Cosby Show was the number one TV show of the year and we watched it somewhat but not regularly.   I always enjoyed Murder, She Wrote but the show was becoming repetitious, a murder, a mystery, and Jessica solves it with amazing skills almost equal to Sherlock Holms. I regularly watched Cheers, both new episodes and reruns of shows from previous years that I had missed.  The show My Two Dads aired for the first time about the mix-ups and trials of two single men raising a teenage daughter.  In the current day and age such a show would be about two gay men but the show in ’87 both me were straight and were both lovers of the daughter’s mother.  

Music

The number one song of the year was "Walk Like An Egyptian" by the Bangles which was fun I didn’t find all that interesting.  On the other hand "With or Without You" and "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" by U2 I liked enough to buy their The Joshua Tree album, with the latter song still meaningful to me today.   Michael Jackson and Madonna were hitting the charts but I never cared much for either of their music   Music TV or just MTV as it was known was becoming popular and was airing on my cable networks and many, if not most, new songs had associated music videos.  .  Interesting enough, in the early years, at the start of every hour, a version of the Columbia space shuttle lunch was shown until they stopped showing it after the Challenger Disaster in 1986.

Christmas