Exercise Music

This weekend while I was on the elliptical, I swapped out Holst's The Planets ("Jupiter" and "Uranus" are awesome for the elliptical) for John Williams and the Boston Pops By Request - it's got music from a lot of 70s and 80s movies - Superman, E.T., Star Wars, et cetera.  "The Flying Theme" from E.T. makes me tear up sentimentally, and I've never been quite sure why.  (It's got a pretty good speed for the elliptical, too.)

I grew up with the 80's geek canon - Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Star Trek, The Goonies, The Princess Bride, The Last Unicorn.  Steven Spielberg made two movies in the 80's that I'm familiar with that have a group of kids as the main protagonists - E.T. and The Goonies.  The Goonies was a huge influence on me as a kid; you've got a group of friends with assorted talents, and if you read any of the (painfully bad) stuff I wrote between 6th and 8th grade that wasn't related to the series I started in 8th grade, it's obviously influenced by Goonies and/or the Great Escape.

So I was thinking about this on the elliptical Sunday, wondering why it was Goonies that had so much influence on my early writing's social dynamics, but E.T.'s soundtrack that makes me tear up.

Essentially they're the same theme:  kids faced with the kind of situations kids are always faced with - moving, losing friends, adults (corporations or the government or some other bureaucracy) coming in and taking away what matters to them in some way.  In Goonies it's their homes being foreclosed on for a golf course - the kind of thing that happens to kids' families that is their parents' problem, but which has a huge effect on the kids in the disruptive effect moving has on them.  E.T. is more fantastical in that it involves the government taking away an alien friend, but it's still one of those things that kids have no power to affect.

The big difference in both movies is that the kids fight back against things they're normally powerless to change, and they win.  Other movies have been made in this vein, but I'm not as familiar with them.  In both of Spielberg's, however, the initiative to defeat the otherwise inevitable comes with no adult prodding or assistance - they pursue the pirate treasure and the rescue of E.T. on their own, although in both situations with the help of their bicycle-riding older brothers and their friends.

So although the thematic reasons for my getting sentimental over them are more or less the same, the reasons that Goonies was a big influence on my junior high writing and E.T. has the heart-string-tugging soundtrack are probably a bit more mundane.  We had Goonies on tape and watched it several times a summer, but the soundtrack composer wasn't one of the big names in soundtracks; E.T.'s soundtrack was composed by John Williams, so when you're buying a compilation CD that has the Boston Pops conducted by John Williams, you're going to get a bunch of John Williams' music.  The Goonies soundtrack is out there, but just not in as much demand.  So in both cases, it's simply a matter of exposure.