Grease and a Sing-a-long: They Go Together…

Why do people keep paying to see movies in theaters when they could watch other films or play video games, for less money or for free, at home? All right, because moviegoing is the last relatively cheap date. But mainly because it’ s a cathedral experience: a hundred or a thousand votaries in a dark room whose only light illuminates those big, gorgeous stars and their dreadful, beautiful problems. The downside is that watching movies is essentially passive. They play; we watch. The only interactive aspect is arguing with the boor on his cell phone two rows behind you.

So a harmonic shout goes out to Grease: Sing-a-long. The 1978 movie was based on the Jim Jacobs-Warren Casey smash show that ran for more than eight years on Broadway and, in its lead character of hotrod hunk Danny Zuko, gave seminal career breaks to young actors who’d stay around for a while: Patrick Swayze, Barry Bostwick, Richard Gere, Peter Gallagher, David Hasselhoff, Treat Williams and… John Travolta. When the movie version came out — with the newly-hot Travolta as Danny, having a cross-clique romance with sweet Sandy Olsson at all-Caucasian Rydell High — it was the top moneymaker of its year and, in real dollars, the 26th biggest earner of all time, as well as the third highest-grossing musical after The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins.

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One of the last movie musicals to spawn five top-five singles on the Billboard charts, Grease sent Jacobs’ and Casey’s teen anthems “Summer Nights” and “We Go Together” to #5, and augmented the Broadway score with three new songs that did even better: the title song (#1), the uptempo duet for Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, You’re the One That I Want (#2) and the Newton-John ballad “Hopelessly Devoted to You” (#3). So there’s plenty of Grease music stocked in the cranial iPods of both middle-aged fans and the Glee generation.

Now, in the summer-camp — and just plain camp — tradition of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the specialized showings of The Sound of Music (they came dressed as nuns) and Mamma Mia!, the Grease rerelease encourages full-throated audience participation through on-screen lyrics.

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These aren’t your great-grandfather’s movie sing-alongs, with words at the bottom and a ball bouncing on the appropriate syllable. Designers Randy Spendlove and Jason Richmond, working with the ROK!T graphics group, have truly animated the Grease song sheet. “Greased Lightnin'” gets a spinning wheel for the O in GO, and Zeus bolts for the “lightnin’.” In the ballads, pink hearts flutter above the lyrics like kitsch angels. It’s imaginative animation in the UPA or Warner Bros. cartoon spirit of the ’50s, the decade of the Grease story; and it gives the movie a Saturday-matinee vibe, where everyone’s a kid and making noise at a movie is part of the show. (And in case the auditorium playing the revival is underpopulated, Grease‘s sound track has been laced with background singers.) If you’re not compelled to sing along, call an ambulance; you may have died without realizing it.

(Read Richard Schickel’s original review of Grease.)

Good thing the songs dig their hooks into our brains, and the graphics are so smart and zesty, because the actual film, as an exercise in the fine art of mise-en-scene, still stinks. The director, Randal Kleiser, had no, repeat no, skill at figuring out what to do with the camera or most of the actors. The look is primitive, the tempo slack (a crime, considering the energy of the story and cast), and every agonizing reaction shot is a cue for assaultive mugging. Kleiser focused his lazy closeups on actors far beyond their school days: Travolta, Kelly Ward and Dinah Manoff were the only under-25s among the 10 main high-schoolers, and Stockard Channing (very good as the slutty Rizzo) was 34 when the movie opened. And as an insult to the decade he was supposed to be apotheosizing, Kleiser exhumed ’50s TV comedy stars — Eve Arden, Sid Caesar, Dody Goodman — and saddled them with rickety dialogue (script by Bronte Woodard), which he then lamely directed.

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So what? It’s a truism that people don’t go to good movies; they go to movies that make them feel good. Grease accomplished that feat with its gilded rearview mirror look at the time when teenagers, and rock ‘n roll, took over. Grease was also on the mark showing the cautious anthropological intermingling of separate sexual tribes: Danny and the boys, bonding in the narcissism of ostentatious hair care; Sandy and the girls, filling their nights with pajama parties that become occasions for ego-boosting and psychodrama malice. These might be givens in teen movies of the past 30 years, but in Grease‘s day they had a little novelty. The show and the movie were also clever in portraying cataclysmic rites of passage (like an unwanted pregnancy) in a fond, joshing tone.

A blend of retro-pop songs and references to ’50s movies like From Here to Eternity, Rebel Without a Cause and Ben-Hur, the movie first appeared at a safe distance of 20 to 25 years after the music it pastiched and the attitudes it parodied had left the scene. But a much longer period than that — 32 years! — has elapsed between the movie Grease and today.For middle-agers seeing it now, the movie offers a dewy recollection of what they — and John Travolta — looked like, way back when.

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What a colt he was: slim, gangly, almost goony, as if he were channeling the Jerry Lewis movies he’d seen as a kid, yet exuding the soft bravado of a young man at ease with mass adoration. In his first movie since his breakout in Saturday Night Fever, Travolta was still evolving, on his way to we-didn’t-know-what, but no less fascinating in this crucial gestation phase. He and Channing, a decade apart in age, are the two actors who tell the audience they know precisely what they’re doing — Channing from her years of craft, Travolta from the genius of intuition. They can sing too.

Now that Grease is enticing moviegoers to get that choral feeling, how about some more sing-along versions of favorite old films? The Wizard of Oz has about a dozen numbers in the Great American Songbook (sorry, fans, “Over the Rainbow” has to be a Judy Garland solo). Anyone for West Side Story? Evita? And, for the boys in the band, Xanadu?

But I’m heterosexual, you say; I don’t even like musicals. Then turn no-song movies into sing-alongs. Enjoy a John Williams-scored double feature, with Jaws (all together now: “bump-bump-BUMP-bump bump-bump-BUMP-bump”) and Star Wars, where you could invent your own lyrics to the theme (“Star Wars / How we loved Star Wars / And they were our wars / When we were young….”). Have a dialogue shout-along to The Godfather, or a fart-along to Blazing Saddles. For the Al Pacino Scarface, replace four-part harmony with four-letter words.

Finally, what’s a book almost everyone knows the words to? The Bible. So let’s all go to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ sing-along. And if you can’t speak Aramaic, replace the dialogue in the film with excerpts from Mel’s latest telephone rant. Hitting your companion is not recommended; that’s too much like picking a fight with that guy sitting behind you.

Read TIME’s original 1972 review of the musical Grease

Read Richard Corliss’ profile of John Travolta