kinsler33

I haven't seen this movie, so I suppose I shouldn't comment. But the rest of the comments on it are excellent, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to thank those who did see it. The couple of comments from 1999 are particularly interesting and of some historic significance.

I became an involuntary Y2K expert when in 1999 I started hearing bogus experts discuss how the world was going to end without understanding anything about how it worked in the first place. The more I tried to calm people down by assuring them that people and not computers were in ultimate control of most systems, the more furious they became. It got to the point where I started a radio show to discuss the matter.

I do hope that someone writes a good book or at least a comprehensive magazine article on the Y2K phenomenon. It was fun while it lasted, and the domain y2k.com has been for sale for years now.

Little did we know that we in the USA had lots more to worry about less than two years later.

The movie has proved more durable than anyone would have thought. It took substantial critical hits for being a Califoria-ized, Olivia-Newton-John-ized adaptation of a beloved, long-running New York show. At least, we mused at the time, they changed the story so they wouldn't have to make Ms Newton-John affect any sort of American accent: certainly not a New York one.

And yet it seems to stand up well on its own. The New Yorker observed at the time that nobody involved with this movie was alive during the era it was supposed to depict, but they clearly had a fine time with the music. Yes, the scenes were clearly from sunny 1970's California, but this didn't bother the kids who saw this in 1978, and enough time has passed that it shouldn't bother us who remember that it was supposed to be in Brooklyn, in the '50's.

Have fun, kids.