With the anniversary upon us, I’ve been seeing quite a few articles proclaiming the summer of ’82 as one of the best summers for movies ever. This Yahoo slideshow sums it up pretty well. My first thought regarding the summer of 1982 is usually, “Holy crap, has it been 30 years?” The second is: “Holy crap, that was a great summer for movies!”
I turned 10 that summer, and in addition to going to the local movie theater, most of that summer was spent reading Marvel comics, playing video games (on the Atari 2600 and at our local arcade) and playing Dungeons & Dragons a couple of times a week. In short, it was heaven.
I’ll admit, scanning through these 15 films, there are a few that don’t really resonate with me in 2012 (The World According to Garp, An Officer and a Gentleman, and Night Shift), but most of the rest are still favorites of mine and it boggles my mind that they were released over the course of a few months. Several fall into the category of “when I flip through the channels and it’s on, I watch it to the end.”
My favorites from the list:
Conan the Barbarian (5/14/82)
The Road Warrior (5/21/82)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (6/4/82)
Poltergeist (6/4/82)
E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (6/11/82)
Blade Runner (6/25/82)
The Thing (6/25/82)
The Secret of NIMH (7/2/82)
TRON (7/9/82)
Pink Floyd: The Wall (8/6/82)
One film that surprisingly isn’t on this list is Clint Eastwood’s Firefox (6/18/82).
I’d like to revisit each of these films in blog posts corresponding to the week they were released, but as you can see I’m a bit behind schedule with the first six, but the 30th anniversary of the release of Blade Runner (one of my favorite movies of all time) is coming up, so I’d better get cracking on that one.
On a side note, thank you to everyone that has been reading and following my blog. The latest stats show visitors from 26 countries. Please feel free to comment, as well as follow me on Twitter (@Fabrizio_Fante). Emails are also welcome at fabfante (at) gmail (dot) com.
Fante's Inferno 