When it comes down to it, I just enjoy watching the Griswold family do their thing. Thanks to the vacation website homeaway.com and its new advertising campaign, we are able to follow Clark and Ellen on an adventure again. In connection with a special Super Bowl commercial, homeaway.com has a 14 minute mini-movie starring Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo reprising those roles. It is called Hotel Hell Vacation and is really quite funny too, so I wanted to feature it here for your viewing pleasure...

To be honest, I had not really heard of homeaway.com before this, but I will definitely keep them in mind in the future as a result. At the very least, this ad campaign has accomplished that. Thanks for giving us another Griswold adventure and thanks for doing it right. I am happy to see another example of the 80s still being very alive and relevant even in 2010.

That's all I have for this quick issue of Kickin' it Old School. Thanks for reading. If you are interested in reading any of my other 80s related issues, please click there for a summary of those. You can also always click on the Archives in the upper left hand column or use that Google Search Box to find any past issues or topics you may have missed. If you are a fan of Kickin' it, PLEASE CLICK ON THE FACEBOOK LOGO in the upper right hand column. This will take you to the Fan Page where I ask you to then click on "Become a Fan". Even if you are not a Facebook member yet, please consider joining and registering as a fan at that page. You can also follow Old School on Twitter by clicking on the FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER LOGO also in the upper right hand column. This will take you the page and you can just click on the box that says "Follow". Even though the blog only updates a couple times a week, I try to send out daily 80s tweets. Let other 80s fans know about it as well! Peace and much love.

Check this out: There is a video compilation out there titled "The 100 Cheesiest Movie Quotes of All Time" that is pretty fun to watch. It is about 10 minutes long. It only has a small representation of 80s movies and they do pick on a few particular films a little more than others. Whether a line is "cheesy" or not is debatable, but you can still have a cheesy line that fits the moment properly. Some of these lines might be cheesy, but I don't feel they deserve to be ridiculed. Either way, it is an entertaining 10 minute compilation and wanted to share it with you here:

Quote of the day: "It is the nature of man to rise to greatness, if greatness is expected of him." -John Steinbeck

Today (February 5, 2010) is the 53^rd birthday of Nick Laird-Clowes who is best known as part of the British folk rock group The Dream Academy along with Kate St. John and Gilbert Gabriel. The band had one successful single in the U.S. and that was from their debut 1985 self-titled album. "Life In A Northern Town" reached #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February of 1986. It is reported that the song was a tribute to Nick Drake, the British singer-songwriter who tragically died of an antidepressant overdose in 1974. I have always liked this mellow song with an outstanding chorus, so I decided that this week's Flashback Video would be "Life In A Northern Town" by The Dream Academy...

There were two different versions of the music video. That was the first one which was made in 1984 and was directed by Tim Pope filmed in Hebden Bridge near Halifax in Yorkshire, UK. The second version was filmed in 1985 and was directed by Leslie Libman and Larry Williams. It was filmed in and around Newcastle upon Tyne with some scenes filmed in Manchester in the UK and in the USA (near Pittsburgh, PA). The video featured footage from one of their first TV appearances, on the British music show The Tube. Libman also directed other 80s videos like "Manic Monday" by The Bangles, "Mad About You" by Belinda Carlisle and "Sweet Freedom" by Michael McDonald among many others. Here is that second and more popular version of the video...

A cover version of "Life In A Northern Town," recorded by the country music duo Sugarland (with guest vocals from Little Big Town and Jake Owen), was a Top 40 country hit and Grammy Award nominee back in 2008. As for The Dream Academy, all three members of the band remain active recording musicians, each with his or her own career though they last released an album together in 1990 and last toured in 1991. They did have a couple songs included in the John Hughes classic films Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Planes, Trains & Automobiles, but The Dream Academy is surely known as a "one hit wonder" in the U.S. Like I said about Peter Schilling in my last issue, at least they gave us one classic 80s song and that's one more than most musicians ever get.

That'll do it for another issue of Kickin' it Old School. Thanks for reading. If you are interested in reading any of my other 80s related issues, please click there for a summary of those. If you want to see the past issues of Flashback Videos, just type that into the Google Search Box at the top of the right hand column and it should give you a list of all of them. You can also always click on the Archives in the upper left hand column or use that Google Search Box to find any past issues or topics you may have missed. If you are a fan of Kickin' it, PLEASE CLICK ON THE FACEBOOK LOGO in the upper right hand column. This will take you to the Fan Page where I ask you to then click on "Become a Fan". Even if you are not a Facebook member yet, please consider joining and registering as a fan at that page. You can also follow Old School on Twitter by clicking on the FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER LOGO also in the upper right hand column. This will take you the page and you can just click on the box that says "Follow". Even though the blog only updates a couple times a week, I try to send out daily 80s tweets. Let other 80s fans know about it as well! Peace and much love.

Today (January 28, 2010) is the 54^th birthday of German musician Peter Schilling. In Germany he still seems to be well-known and has a large catalog of music, but in the U.S. he is known best for his only international hit single "Major Tom (I'm Coming Home)" from his 1983 album Error in the System. Though the original song was recorded in German, the international hit version was sung in English. It is assumed that the song is a re-telling of David Bowie's 1969 song "Space Oddity" about the character being caught in an accident in outer space. I have always liked this synth-pop song, so this week's Flashback Video is "Major Tom (I'm Coming Home)" by Peter Schilling...

The song would reach #14 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, though it did hit #1 on the Germany, Austria, Canada and Switzerland charts. Unfortunately, this would be Schilling's one and only hit in the United States. He is a "one-hit wonder" at least in terms of his American success. In 2009, Shiny Toy Guns recorded a cover of "Major Tom (I'm Coming Home)" that was featured in a commercial for the 2010 Lincoln MKZ. It was later released as a single and on the remix album Girls Le Disko. Here is that Lincoln commercial featuring the cover version of the song...

Alles Gute zum Geburtstag! Peter Schilling. (That's happy birthday in German, I am told). Thanks for at least one classic 80s song. Your one international hit song is still one more than most musicians ever get.

That's another issue of Kickin' it Old School. Thanks for reading. If you are interested in reading any of my other 80s related issues, please click there for a summary of those. If you want to see the past issues of Flashback Videos, just type that into the Google Search Box at the top of the right hand column and it should give you a list of all of them. You can also always click on the Archives in the upper left hand column or use that Google Search Box to find any past issues or topics you may have missed. If you are a fan of Kickin' it, PLEASE CLICK ON THE FACEBOOK LOGO in the upper right hand column. This will take you to the Fan Page where I ask you to then click on "Become a Fan". Even if you are not a Facebook member yet, please consider joining and registering as a fan at that page. You can also follow Old School on Twitter by clicking on the FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER LOGO also in the upper right hand column. This will take you the page and you can just click on the box that says "Follow". Even though the blog only updates a couple times a week, I try to send out daily 80s tweets. Let other 80s fans know about it as well! Peace and much love.

At the website boxofficemojo.com, they estimate the number of tickets sold and then multiply that by the average box office ticket now which is $7.35 to get the adjusted comparison. According to the site, adjusting for ticket price inflation is not an exact science and should be used to give you a general idea of what a movie might have made if released in a different year, assuming it sold the same number of tickets. Since these figures are based on average ticket prices they cannot take into effect other factors that may affect a movie's overall popularity and success. Such factors include but are not limited to: increases or decreases in the population, the total number of movies in the marketplace at a given time, economic conditions that may help or hurt the entertainment industry as a whole (e.g., war), the relative price of a movie ticket to other commodities in a given year, competition with other related medium such as the invention and advancements of Television, VHS, DVD, the Internet, etc. Still, this method best compares "apples to apples" when examining the history of box office earnings.

As a result, Avatar which currently ranks #2 on the unadjusted list falls all the way down to #26 when you adjust for inflation. Titanic which ranks #1 on the unadjusted list falls down to #6. 1939's Gone With the Wind only ranks at #99 on the unadjusted list with just under $200 million, but jumps all the way up to #1 when you adjust for inflation incredibly taking it over $1.4 billion. Here are the Top 5 movies on the list adjusted for inflation:
1. Gone With the Wind (1939) - $1.485 billion
2. Star Wars (1977) - $1.309 billion
3. The Sound of Music (1965) - $1.047 billion
4. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) - $1.043 billion
5. The Ten Commandments (1956) - $963 million

The average movie ticket price in 1939 when Gone With the Wind was originally released was just $0.23! By 1982 when E.T. was released it was still just $2.94 and by the end of the 80s it would go up another dollar to $3.97 in 1989. By the end of the following decade it would rise to $5.08 in 1999 and, as mentioned before, is now all the way up to $7.35 at the end of 2009.

As noted above, 1982's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial is the highest ranking film from the 80s on this list at #4. That includes its re-releases in both 1985 and 2002. Here are the other films from the 80s to make the Top 100 on the All-Time U.S. Domestic Gross Box Office Earnings Adjusted for Inflation:
12. The Empire Strikes Back (1980) - $721.6 million
14. Return of the Jedi (1983) - $691.3 million
16. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) - $647.8 million
32. Ghostbusters (1984) - $519.9 million
40. Beverly Hills Cop (1984) - $493.6 million
49. Batman (1989) - $462.7 million
59. Back to the Future (1985) - $434.0 million
63. Tootsie (1982) - $418.2 million
84. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) - $393.5 million
94. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) - $363.2 million
100. Top Gun (1986) - $350.2 million

You can go to boxofficemojo.com to see the rest of the list if you are interested. It seems like common sense to me that movie box office success should be normalized like this or simply ranked by attendance numbers rather than dollars. It really puts the box office achievements in perspective when you recognize that the average cost of a movie now is over $4.00 more (+150%) than in early 80s and $7.00 more (+3095%) than it was back in 1939 when Gone With the Wind was released. Not sure where Avatar will eventually rank on this list, but I think it is only right to put its achievements into proper historical perspective.

That'll do it for this short issue of Kickin' it Old School. Thanks as always for reading. If you are interested in reading any of my other 80s related issues, please click there for a summary of those. You can also always click on the Archives in the upper left hand column or use the Google Search Box at the top of the right hand column to find any other issues you may have missed. If you are a fan of Kickin' it, PLEASE CLICK ON THE FACEBOOK LOGO in the upper right hand column. This will take you to the Fan Page where I ask you to then click on "Become a Fan". Even if you are not a Facebook member yet, please consider joining and registering as a fan at that page. You can also follow Old School on Twitter by clicking on the FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER LOGO also in the upper right hand column. This will take you the page and you can just click on the box that says "Follow". I am sending daily 80s tweets, so sign up to get those. Let other 80s fans know about it as well! Peace and much love.

Check this out: As regular readers know, I always enjoy a humorous or ironic sign. This includes billboards and I was just sent a few that I thought were worth sharing. Not sure if these are real or not, but they are funny either way. Enjoy!

Quote of the day: "When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love." -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.