Friday, February 2, 2024

The Theme Song for The Fall Guy

Recently thinking about The Fall Guy's old theme song I took another look at "The Unknown Stuntman," and, yeah, I'm reminded not just of how much that memorable theme seems to comport with a spirit other than the one the trailer conveyed, but how it belongs to another era in other way. This is not only a matter of the specific references--with those to the singer's having "been seen with Farrah," and "gone fast with a girl named Bo" (though in fairness, how many members of the target audience for the upcoming movie would know who he's talking about going just by that information, let alone appreciate the humor in Lee Majors singing about "Farrah" specifically, or get why supermodel Cheryl Tiegs, if they recognize that name, is in the list at all?). It is also because through all of them the song references an era that saw, beyond any one celebrity or group of celebrities and the minutiae of their careers, a media world which still had screen stars and sex symbols, and in which one could expect to acknowledge that men are dazzled by screen goddesses' exceptional, conventional, physical beauty and the sex appeal derived therefrom without condemnation or hypocrisy and not bring upon themselves a frenzy of pearl-clutching (or even real) outrage for having done so.

How very, very different is this third decade of the twenty-first century (as one piece I ran into about the song made clear as I did my bit of research for this post)--and how very different is the movie version of The Fall Guy likely to be from what we remember, likely not to the film's advantage as either a piece of entertainment, or a commercial endeavor.

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