Thoughts on a Pair of Eighties Films

I was in high school student in the 1980s. I was a good student and I went on the school trips to various cities for both educational visits and for college tours. There would be maybe one or two chaperones per ten kids and we'd stay in hotel rooms with four kids in a room.

During one of these trips, one of my roommates figured out that the hotel TV got the Playboy Channel. No one objected, but I was secretly concerned about the viewing showing up on the bill. Anyway, so we watched what that channel had to show that night. And what it had to show, when we tuned in, was Joysticks (1983) (at imdb) (at wikipedia).

I remember thinking it was a terrible film.

Fast forward a few decades, and I'm watching or rewatching a lot of 1970s and 1980s films. During this I come across Hardbodies (1984) (at imdb) (at wikipedia) and I watch it about a month ago.

It is, uh, not good. It's an improbable T&A fest at recognizable beach areas of Los Angeles. A newly homeless kid finds an opportunity to teach some newly single guys his dad's age about how to score with the modern youths. Until he decides they're not cool. But here is some interesting (and again improbable) home automation in one bedroom set. I found that bit amusing.

But in my usual style, after I watched it, I read about it. (Imagine one of those good / bad idea memes: "Learn about the film before watching it? Nah. After, Yes.") Wikipedia has this little note about Hardbodies:

An initial plan to sell the film for broadcast on the Playboy Channel fell through when, according to [producer Jeff] Begun, the network found it "too soft." Instead, Columbia picked it up for theatrical distribution.

Now I'm thinking about Joysticks again. I can't find it again, but I did once read a review of this film that called it "an attempt at a T&A spectacular that doesn't have enough T&A" or words to that effect. How does Joysticks get on Playboy Channel when Hardbodies was "too soft"?

So I re-watched Joysticks. There's a lot of nudity by 2020s standards, but maybe not a lot by "raunchy eighties comedy" standards, and much of the skin is front loaded, leaving a cringe comedy kids vs adults conflict you've seen it a thousand times to fill out the movie. The writer and/or director has clearly watched Animal House (1978) and made a checklist of things they want to include, not the least of which is a fat slob sort-of hero character climbing a ladder to get to an upper floor bedroom window. But to make it different, this time it's the bedroom window for the chief villian of the film, where his wife is totally zonked out on sleeping pills. (Her sexuality and her husband's disinterest are played for laughs. Cringe laughs.)

The video game aspects of Joysticks are okay. There's a bunch of clips of games clearly just a few seconds into game play. But we do meet the fat slob character as he's trying to break a million in Pac-Man, with game play. Later there's some "Super Pac-Man" (which you don't see often), a backroom game of "strip video" with "Streaking", and "Satan's Hollow" which the film makers managed to get pre-release for showcasing.

Overall, Hardbodies seems more of a Playboy offering than Joysticks, and I think my high school assessment of it as crap holds up okay. So why? My only guess is that Playboy Channel was just willing to put raunchy theatrical films on during evening prime time, but didn't want that stuff actually endorsed as "Playboy" branded.

A final note. No one ever mentioned anything about a Playboy Channel item on the bill. I don't know if we got away with it because of a glitch, because no one looked closely at the bill, or because whoever looked at it didn't want to touch that issue. I don't think I have watched Playboy Channel since then, the quality of the entertainment was not that appealing.