Transcript note: This transcript is based on the original working script. It may contain production notes, draft wording, spelling mistakes or other material that differs from the finished video - these scripts were meant to be spoken, not read.

Streets of Fire.

It was pitched as a rock & roll fable.

The studio expected Grease meets The Warriors and what they got was Blade Runner with guitars.

Forty years later, and that broken studio dream is why Streets of Fire is a cult classic.

It has Willem Dafoe as a villain straight out of a fever dream,

music written by Jim Steinman,

and a young Bill Paxton popping up as a punk bartender.

But it failed so badly,- well - it barely made half its money back.

This is a story of another time, another place.

[INTRO]

If you’ve ever tried to explain Streets of Fire to someone who hasn’t seen it, you’ll know it’s not easy.

It opens with a concert - smoke machines, leather jackets, crowd chanting - and then seemingly out of nowhere… a biker gang storms the stage and kidnaps the singer.

That's the setup and about the whole of why we're here.

Ellen Aim - the kidnapped singer - isn’t just some random girl.

She’s Cody’s ex.

Cody?

He left town years ago, burned every bridge on the way out,

He only comes back only because his sister guilt-trips him into doing something decent for once.

And he aint too happy about it.

What follows is basically a rescue mission through a city that looks like the 1950s and the future had a fistfight, with no clear winner.

It’s pulp fiction in the original sense - not Tarantino, but the old cheap paperbacks where plot doesn’t matter as much as attitude.

Tough guy, kidnapped girl and a city full of gangs and neon - where Logic is optional but Style is mandatory.

It came out in 1984, directed by Walter Hill.

By then he’d already made The Warriors and 48 Hours, so Universal figured they knew what they were getting.

They didn’t.

The hero of the story returns to his grimy, half-retro, half-science-fiction hometown to save the girl

And then it’s kinda like a comic book nobody ever finished writing.

Obviously with this being billed as a rock and roll fable, the music is a huge part of why this thing works

Or at least, why it’s remembered.

Annoyingly, I can’t play it, because YouTube would tear me apart for it,

but imagine the most over-the-top 80s power ballads you’ve ever heard,

Mix that with Bruce Springsteen’s working-class swagger and Meat Loaf’s melodrama, and you’re close.

And. None of that is without reason.

The vibe of the whole thing is inspired by the Bruce Springsteen song of the same name, Streets of Fire, from the Darkness on the Edge of Town album.

They originally wanted to use the song as the films finale, but when Bruce Springsteen learned he wasn’t going to be the one performing it he pulled his permission and Jim Steinman was brought in to replace him.

He'd end up giving the film two of its biggest songs.

Nowhere Fast and Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young.

Jim Steinmans sound is undeniable: thunderous drums, gospel choirs, and enough melodrama to fill a stadium.

Every track hits you with the kind of wall-of-sound energy only he could deliver.

Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young - the replacement song - is pure theatrical excess, and it saves the ending from just sort of… stopping.

And, yes - Meatloaf did record a song called Nowhere Fast by Jim Steinman, but while it had the same idea and same music the lyrics would be different.

Jim Steinman is the reason I know of the film at all, I'm all in on his

"Wagnerian rock" style of music – I’m a big fan, have been for a long time.

The cast only makes it stranger - in a good way.

Michael Paré, fresh off Eddie and the Cruisers, plays the hero - Tom Cody.

He’s an ex Mercenary - Stoic, square-jawed, and not quite as iconic as the film wanted him to be, but he fits the tone: a guy from another time, in a world that never was.

He's since said he didn’t really understand the film’s tone while shooting it - which might explain that slightly dazed look he carries through most of it.

Interestingly the role was supposed to go to a young Tom Cruise, but he’d already committed to making Legend - So it never came to be.

Amy Madigan plays McCoy - a tough, no-nonsense ex-soldier who tags along to help Cody with the rescue.

She’s all grit and sarcasm – constantly cutting through the film’s melodrama with this deadpan, grounded energy.

It’s one of those roles that should’ve been thankless, but Amy Madigan turns it into one of the film’s secret weapons

She's basically the audience’s voice of reason while trapped in this pulp novel.

Originally her character of McCoy was supposed to be male but was rewritten for Amy when she expressed an interest in the part.

It works - she’s one of the few people on screen who actually feels like she’s from the world Hill imagined, not just visiting it.

Deborah Van Valkenburgh, who’d worked with Walter Hill before on The Warriors, plays Cody’s sister Reva - she's the emotional anchor of the story, even if she doesn’t get much screen time.

She’s the one person trying to remind Cody that this isn’t just about saving a girl, it’s about doing something decent for once.

She’s a rare moment of warmth in a film full of neon posturing and rock-opera grandstanding

Diane Lane stars as Ellen Aim, the kidnapped singer - She was nineteen here, but somehow still completely convincing as a world-weary rock star.

Walter Hill was reluctant to cast her at first, he’d envisioned her in her late twenties when he wrote the part.

But when she turned up for the audition - she went full on rock chick - She turned up dressed in black leather pants and a mesh top which proved to him that she was committed to the role.

He ended up being so impressed with her as Ellen he actually wrote extra scenes for her

She’s not in it a lot - so who knows how small the part originally was - But I’m glad we got what we did.

She doesn’t actually sing any of the songs in the film though

That was Laurie Sargent and Holly Sherwood - but she sells the fantasy effortlessly

So much so that if you look the songs up here on YouTube they are actually credited to Diane Lane by those that don’t know better.

Ellen Aims band, The Attackers, were all played by the band Laurie Sargent sang with, Face to Face

For the film they’re credited to a made-up studio band Jim Steinman created for this project, Fire Inc.,

Rick Moranis plays her manager, but not the lovable nerd we all know from Ghostbusters or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

Here, he’s an arrogant, sharp-tongued little bastard-constantly shouting at everyone.

It’s a little weird seeing him this abrasive, but it gives the film an edge it really needs.

And speaking of abrasive:

According to Walter Hill, Rick Moranis was “a pain in the ass” on set, constantly questioning direction, because he wasn't allowed to improvise anything.

Yeah. Cranky comedian in need of an outlet-kind of fits the role, doesn't it?

And then there’s Willem Dafoe.

If you’ve never seen him in this, imagine a villain who looks like he’s stepped straight off the cover of a pulpy 1950s horror comic -

black leather overalls, slicked-back hair, and of course, that stare

This was one of his first big roles, and even then, he was impossible to ignore.

Apparently, the leather outfit was so tight it had to be zipped up while he was already standing on his motorcycle.

Which is exactly the kind of detail that makes sense for this movie.

Internet trivia claims he nearly suffocated in that get up and had to be liberated with a straw.

I couldn’t find a single real source - just dusty old forum posts repeating the same paragraph.

But spiritually? It feels true.

Audiences in ’84 didn’t know what to make of any of it.

It cost around fourteen million dollars - a lot back then - and barely made half that at the box office.

Critics called it cold, indulgent, and emotionally empty.

But over time, Streets of Fire started finding people who actually got it.

Because beneath the big hair and explosions, it’s a film made by someone who deeply loved the idea of cool.

Everything’s heightened - the lighting, the dialogue, even the gunfights feel choreographed like dance numbers.

It’s a world that runs entirely on attitude.

Walter Hill made the film he always wanted to make as a teenager

Everything he thought, was cool.

Custom cars, motorcycles, kissing in the rain while trains passed in the night -

Characters that wore leather jackets, bound by the honour and always willing and able to make a joke in a bad situation.

And, that’s what we got essentially.

Streets of Fire might have failed miserably in its home countries, but the Japanese lapped it up.

It even won an award for Best Foreign Language Feature.

It’d inspire several anime releases, including some bigger names like Bubblegum Crisis.

And if you ever watch Bubblegum Crisis, you might think one of the opening scenes is oddly familiar, for good reason - It’s pretty much a copy of the one from Streets of Fire.

Two early Japanese video games also took heavy inspiration from the film

Final Fight from Capcom in 1989 borrowed the look and feel of it all, and they even went so far as to name one of the characters ‘Cody’.

Streets of Rage from the early 90s, the visual DNA, the attitude is all soaked into that game as well.

You can trace it all back here - to this one beautiful, messy, misunderstood rock opera.

Walter Hill originally planned it as the first part of a trilogy - The Adventures of Tom Cody.

But the box office takings killed that idea overnight.

Decades later, it did get a sequel. Kind of.

Road to Hell.

It’s a film that's been banded about for a good few years now, it’s never had an official release but you can find it, if you know where to look…

(whisper: it’s on YouTube)

It’s. Well. Not what you might expect.

It’s a low budget independent thing, directed by Albert Pyun - And, if you know what name - You know what you’re getting.

And, if you don't and decide you want to know more then - Buckle in for a bumpy, but interesting ride.

Michael Pare returns as Cody, or a version of him - Deborah Van Valkenburgh is back as his sister as well.

And - You know - I said Streets of Fire was hard to explain, but - Road to Hell - I don’t even.

I’ll make a video on it at some point, when I know where to start.

It's…interesting.

Another time though, yeah?

But - Forty years later, people still care enough about this odd, broken gem to bring it back.

That’s the thing about cult films.

They don’t fade away - they just wait until the right people find them.

Streets of Fire ultimately failed because it never cared about being realistic, it just cared about being cool.

Mood, style, fast cars, leather jackets and rock and roll - That’s all it actually cared about, right from the start.

It was never trying to be timeless, it was trying to be mythic.

And - I - For one believe - It achieved that.

For all it’s chaos, it’s weirdness

All the choices that make no sense

It still ends up meaning something to someone.

It won its audience one at a time.

People like me who showed up for the music.

People like you - watching a video on the internet about it all, 40 years later.

It’s what cult films do.

Films like these, they don’t need to make sense.

Sometimes, films - they just need to feel like something.

And Streets of Fire does.

I don’t know - Maybe it really was made in another time, and another place.

It honestly all feels like it lives in a memory you can’t quite place, or a book you read once you can’t remember the name of.

I don’t know what it is.

What I do know is that

Walter Hill promised “a rock & roll fable.”

And, love it or hate it, that’s exactly what he delivered.

Anyways…