Top Gun: Body Oil, Aviators, And A Navy Recruitment Ad

Top Gun is one of those movies you think you already know until you sit down and really watch it again. We put the quotes and memes aside and ask a better question: why does this 1986 hit still feel like a full-body adrenaline rush, even decades later, when the hairstyles and synths scream “the 80s”? 

We break down the real-world roots of the Top Gun school, then dig into the creative choices that turned naval aviation into pure movie myth. Tony Scott’s music-video energy gives the film its polished, rockstar-of-the-sky look, and we talk about how that style shaped everything from aviator sunglasses and leather jackets to the way aerial action gets shot in modern blockbusters. Along the way, we unpack the casting and character dynamics that keep the story moving: Tom Cruise’s Maverick as talented but reckless, Val Kilmer’s Iceman as the disciplined foil, and Anthony Edwards’ Goose as the emotional anchor. 

The soundtrack gets its own spotlight because it deserves it. We trace the stories behind “Danger Zone,” “Take My Breath Away,” and the surprisingly strategic way Kenny Loggins landed “Playing With The Boys.” We also swap favorite moments, call out the movie myths (yes, including the famous volleyball vibe), and talk about the cultural impact that stretched from recruitment spikes to home viewing habits and eventually Top Gun: Maverick. 

If you like movie history, behind-the-scenes trivia, and smart but fun takes on iconic films, subscribe, share the show with a friend, and leave us a five-star review so more people can find it.

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Transcript

Welcome And Listener Calls

Dylan 0:16

Welcome to Have You Seen the Movie Podcast, where every movie is a premiere.

Joe 0:21

This week we're Buzzing the Tower with Top Gun, the movie that made aviator glasses, leather jackets, and fighter pilots cooler than ever.

Dylan 0:30

If you're enjoying the show, make sure to follow us on your favorite podcast app and leave us a five-star rating. It really helps the show grow.

Joe 0:38

And we want to hear from you. Text us your name and a movie suggestion using the link in the description.

Dylan 0:45

This week's movie, Top Gun, is rated PG for action, language, and some sensuality. If that's not suitable for little ears, we hope you'll tune in next week. Okay. Ooh. All right.

Release Year And Creative Team

Dylan 0:58

So when did this come out, Joe? 1986. Okay. I was trying to place it like when we were watching it. Yeah. It definitely has that look to it.

Joe 1:08

Yeah, for me, it's interesting because it always makes me think it was filmed later or like in the late 80s or something, but I think that's because a lot of this movie created trends that that carried on. Yeah, they carried over.

Dylan 1:29

And who was the director?

Joe 1:32

Tony Scott.

Dylan 1:34

So what other stuff has he directed then?

Joe 1:37

Uh so up until this point, he had done like some music videos and commercials, things like that. So his brother is Ridley Scott, who's done action movies and aliens and stuff like that. But one of my favorite movies that Tony Scott did was called True Romance, which was a script that was sold by Quentin Tarantino, and so it's part of the kind of Quentin Tarantino verse. Gotcha. So and the only director's commentary of Quentin Tarantino is on Tony Scott's True Romance. Oh, really? Yeah. Which I don't know why he doesn't do director's commentaries, but I really love that one because it's just so much into it.

Dylan 2:25

And then who was the producers of it?

Joe 2:29

So Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson. Jerry Bruckheimer, all the Transformers, like Oh, okay. Anything with big explosions pretty much. That's his thing. Yeah. Rock music and big explosions. Yeah, the movie was inspired by an article that he had read, Jerry Bruckheimer had read in a California magazine. Oh, really? Yeah. So he read this article on Top Gun School. And so the Top Gun School basically what they do is they pick the best pilots from their squadron and that are on the aircraft carrier. So multiple people will join up and go over to Miramar, which is in California. They're initially all the pilots what they found was that they weren't skilled in combat, so they would go out and not do great because of it. So they decided to start this. And so they what happens is they go to that school, and then when they come back to their squadrons, they have to teach the rest of the squadron. Pass this along. Yeah. So it's like they have they pick the best of the best out of their squadron, send them to Top Gun, they come back, and then everybody else learns. Okay. Yeah. But they they read it and thought this is gonna this will make a good movie. Yeah. So before watching this, what did you actually know about Top Gun besides the famous quotes?

Dylan 4:06

Man,

What We Knew Before Watching

Dylan 4:07

not a whole lot really. Like I kind of I knew the general premise of it. I think that's what that would be hard to miss. But a lot of the finer details of it and storyline, like really not. So yeah, it was a good watch. Yeah.

Joe 4:30

I think one of the biggest quotes that people is what is the I got the knee for speed. And then oh, what's the goose one? Let's see. Yeah, it's Talk to Me Goose.

Dylan 4:45

Oh. Yeah, that's a good one. Talk to me Goose. I've heard it in other contexts. If you haven't seen this movie in a while, here's the quick setup. Pete Maverick Mitchell is a talented but reckless Navy fighter pilot selected to attend the Elite Top Gun Naval Fighter Weapons School. As he competes to become one of the best, he must balance his confidence with discipline, overcome personal loss, and learn what it truly means to be a leader. Yeah. All right. So, Joe, what was your first time watching Top Gun like?

Joe 5:23

Jeez, I don't even know. It's one of those movies that you watch and you can't even count how many times you've watched it. Watching it recently and being older, it's like there's other things that kind of come into play. Yeah, more that you pick up on. Yeah. So yeah, I can't remember originally, but I know that it being on VHS or cable or whatever, like me and my brother would spend time at home. We were latchkey kids, and so we'd watch all these different movies and stuff. And so we just had our favorite quotes and things like that from Top Gun.

Dylan 6:01

Yeah, that's one of those things that really surprised me about it was the fact that they were able to so cleanly wrap so much of his kind of personal life into the flight school. It was not jarring like switching back and forth or anything like that. It was just straight going through the phases of his life. Yeah.

Joe 6:28

Yeah.

Dylan 6:28

So I was pretty impressed by that.

Joe 6:31

It's a really for as many times as they rewrote the script is really good. Yeah. All right, let's talk characters.

Characters And Casting Choices

Dylan 6:45

So you have Maverick played by Tom Cruise, just so talented. He definitely gave off the cocky confidence.

Joe 6:57

Yeah.

Dylan 6:57

Yeah. So even at the detriment, if you will, of kind of those around him.

Joe 7:04

Yeah. He had done Taps, Outsiders, Color of Money, and he was working on a movie called Legend while they were trying to put this movie together. Yeah. And when they were writing the script, a couple of them would be like, just think Tom Cruise doing this. And they didn't know if they could get him or if if he wanted to do it or anything. They just had this person in mind. This is what the character's gonna be like. And when they finally did, they kept trying to court him. They kept calling agents and being like, hey, this is we want this, and he just wouldn't commit. So they flew him out to I think it was Miramar to go on a flight in the Jets.

Dylan 7:52

Yeah.

Joe 7:53

And they said, like, when they initially saw him, the pilots, when they initially saw him, they thought he was just some hippie or something like that. Because in legend, he has long hair and a ponytail. And so he was still filming the movie. And so they were like, oh, who's this hippie? Give him a ride, he'll never forget, kind of thing. And so they took him, and that's what got him committed because he had always wanted to fly in a jet, be a pilot, but just didn't happen. And so when he got to go up there, it was just like, All right, I'm in.

Dylan 8:28

Wow. And then you have Goose, which who played Goose?

Joe 8:32

Anthony Edwards.

Dylan 8:34

Yeah, he definitely gave the loyal to the end friend. Yeah.

Joe 8:42

Yeah. It was kind of cool where at certain point Maverick tells him you're the only family I got. Yeah. He had no idea that he was gonna sing or put pretend to play piano. Oh yeah. I guess Tony Scott was listening to some music and Great Balls of Fire came on, and then they're like, Oh, let's add this. Oh, funny. So that became there's several times in the movie where he's Great Balls of Fire.

Dylan 9:05

That became his whole personality. Yeah.

unknown 9:07

Yeah.

Dylan 9:08

So another character in it is Iceman, played by Val Kilmer.

Joe 9:14

Yeah.

Dylan 9:14

Why is that name familiar?

Joe 9:16

Val Kilmer?

Dylan 9:17

Yeah.

Joe 9:18

Let me see. So my top favorite Val Kilmer movies are Top Gun. Oh really? The Doors. He played Jim Morrison. Willow. I I remember thinking he was so cool in that movie. Tombstone. Huge one.

Dylan 9:38

Yeah.

Joe 9:39

Yeah. So let me see. I'm trying to think of the last one. Heat. Heat was he played this unassuming character in it in Heat, but it just yeah, it was Val Kilmer.

Dylan 9:53

I really liked how it was the opposite of Maverick because he was the calm and disciplined versus Maverick's confidence and immaturity.

Joe 10:14

Yeah. The consultants on the film said that of the characters, Iceman would have been the best pilot. Yeah. Partly because you're supposed to stick with your other people, and Maverick was always going, leaving people or whatever.

Dylan 10:33

Right trying to one up. Yeah. Yeah. Which in those sort of situations makes a huge difference. And then you have Maverick's love interest, Charlie. So who was she played by? Kelly McGillis.

Joe 10:49

Okay.

Dylan 10:50

And she played the flight instructor, or not flight instructor, but yeah, so it's an interesting thing.

Joe 10:56

So apparently they had to get obviously the US government's approval. But then at every level, like even though they got like the head person of the pilots or whatever, they still had to go down a level and get their permission as well. Because the highest person doesn't want to usurp the other person's authority wherever they're at. So they were on a lower tier of people, and the person said they don't want to let them film because the script was unrealistic. And they were like, What's the problem? And he said, Unlisted people are not allowed to date each other. And so originally in the script, she was just an enlisted, another enlisted Navy person. Oh. And so they decided they were like, who would they interact with? And so he gave them a list and he said, But we do have these people who come in and they evaluate our fighting skills and evaluate what we do and then give us like the best case scenario and stats on what we can do better and all that stuff, like consultants. And so they made her a consultant from this company to come in and evaluate them.

Dylan 12:10

So that's cool.

Joe 12:12

Yeah. And I had always thought that she was a flight instructor or something like that. But then when you listen, you hear the dialogue of her being so.

Dylan 12:21

All right, Joe.

Soundtrack Stories And Hit Songs

Dylan 12:22

I don't think we could do a review of this movie and not talk about the music.

Joe 12:28

Yeah. Wow. Yeah, there was a lot that went into it. Giorgio Marauder was a writer, music writer, composer. He had worked with Blondie, David Bowie, just all these famous people. He actually did the last Daft Punk album. Jerry Bruckheimer had worked with him on Flashdance previously. And he also did Fame and some other things. But he met his assistant named Harold Fultmeyer and then asked him if he was interested in doing any composing for the movie. So he told him what it was about, blah blah blah. I think they I think it was done, so they let him watch it, and he was like, Yeah, I'll do it. And he was like, All right, and so he Harold Fultmeyer said, I think I already got a theme for it. And he's they're like, Oh, we want to hear it, we want to hear it. And Tony Scott caught wind of it, and we want to hear it, we want to hear it. And Tom Cruise got wind of it, so he's like, he didn't really actually have it down.

Dylan 13:32

Oh you make it.

Joe 13:36

They were at this dinner and he decided to leave early. He called up a couple of his buddies, studio buddies, went to the studio that night, composed it, recorded it, and then had everybody over the next day to listen to the main theme for Top Gun. So it was written in a night.

Dylan 13:58

That's impressive.

Joe 13:59

Yeah. So he did a handful of the theme songs on it, main theme and all that, some of the other in-between stuff. But George Giorgio Marauder wrote the hit. He wrote Danger Zone, and he wrote Take My Breath Away. So Kenny Loggins, he said that the music writing was a cattle call, and that they were like he was on the third or fourth screening of the movie, and he said, You look around and it's everybody who's everybody, and writers, artists, all in this room to write for this movie. Wow. And he was just like, How am I gonna write for this movie? How am I gonna get on this movie? And so his strategy was to write for a scene that no one else would want to write for. And so he wrote playing with the boys for the volleyball scene. He was like, I'm gonna find something that nobody else is gonna want to do, and then do that. So he got in, and while they were recording and doing all that other stuff, Todo, the band Toto, they I don't know if you know this band, but they've wrote Africa. Yeah, exactly. The only song I know, and they were known for being studio musicians. The biggest album that people would know is Thriller. They were the musicians on Thriller. They yeah, they even the song thrillers, Steve Lukather is the guitarist for Toto, and he did the main stuff on there. And so they were gonna do it, and then they fell through, and then so they were looking for how do we get this song out? It's a great song, and they asked Kenny Loggins, Hey, were you would you be interested in recording this song? And he was like, Is it upbeat? Because he wanted music for his shows and live stuff, and they're like, Oh yeah, so he just fell into that as well. I always thought he wrote it, I just thought that automatically because he's a huge songwriter and has done so many things, and yeah, that that's the music of it, and with the other the other band was Berlin that did take my breath away. And man, I grew up hearing that song a lot. We had the best of Berlin in the house, and we would just play it. And but the funny thing is they had done a song with Giorgio Marauder in a previous album, and while they were finishing up on that, he told them, Hey, I got this song, it's gonna be great, blah, blah, blah. And we want you to record it. And the lead singer said, Oh, yeah, I'm down for that. And the guitarist was like, I don't know. And so she was like, I guess the band was split up because they wanted to do their original music, but other people were like, Hey, if we can do people's written music and make it good, then let's do that too. There's nothing wrong with that, and so they're very hesitant, but what came out of it was they ended up winning a Grammy, you know, so it's you just gotta make your choices sometimes, and and it was a great song, so um yeah, I liked the music in it, how it just had that really 80s synth sounds, and that's his kind of key stuff, the like the kind of keyboard bass kind of things in there, and yeah, it's just yeah, and I I feel like it it translates over to modern music too. Those songs, Danger Zone is just a rock song. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Filming Style And Jet Photography

Dylan 17:47

Alright, Joe. So let's start talking about how this movie was made. They had so many great shots of the aircraft in it and stuff.

Joe 17:56

Yeah. Yeah, they went to the lengths that they could to get those shots. Tony Scott, we I said had done music videos, and he had done a commercial that featured a Saab car racing a jet.

Dylan 18:11

Oh, yeah.

Joe 18:12

So it was this kind of epic view of the jet comes from behind the car and taken off. Yeah. So he initially wanted to make Top Gun a full war movie like Apocalypse Now and Platoon and all that kind of stuff. So he his original vision was like, oh, this is gonna be gritty and it's gonna be all about the war and all this other stuff. And as the story progressed and the scripts were fine-tuned, he moved from war film to basically showing the rock stars of the sky. Yeah, yeah. And this was the days of MTV, which is short for music television, and they used to show music videos on it. Music videos, how do I explain that? Anyway, so the fashion choices that were made for them for what they look like were based upon all of that. So Tom Cruise's boots were some were something that Bruce Springsteen might have worn. Yeah. And Kelly McGillis' stockings and clothes were were way different than what she would have worn. Yeah. The funny thing is, he was fired three times on the film. What? He was fired three times, and that opening shot where you see the everybody getting ready and they're getting the chats going. He had recorded a bunch in slow motion, and the producer saw the dailies and they're like, We don't want this. What are you doing? And they're in, he was like, Oh, okay, I'll shoot regular footage. And he mistakenly sent the slow-mo footage to the house to get developed, and they saw that, and they're like, You're fired, and we told you not to do this. Oh, wow. He was on the ship for a week still. He couldn't just go. He was stuck there. Yeah. So he just kept filming and shot those scenes the way he wanted to, but that was one. And then with Kelly McGillis, they wanted her to be a little more homely than she was. Oh, yeah. He wanted her to be more rock star, more like stockings and that kind of stuff. And so then they fired him over that. And then there was a shot where he was losing light, and so they couldn't get the ship to turn around. He had to go to the captain and be like, we need to redo this shot, and blah, blah, blah. And so he said, but cost what it cost. And so he ended up out of his own checkbook, took wrote them a check for $25,000. Oh, wow. Just to get the shot. Like if you just picture in your mind one of those black and white Calvin Klein ads. You mean abs? Yeah. Right. That too. Yeah. So that's what Tony Scott was influenced by. And this particular book had military guys and things like that. But they're very, again, like Calvin Klein-ish. And he took photos from there and then just mirrored all the characters to look like these guys. Oh, yeah. He said he had a photo on one of the photos. There's a guy that looks like Tom Cruise. There's a guy that looks like Val Gilmer. He just modeled all the characters after some of these. That's hilarious. Yeah. So their hair, the white shirts, the all the kinds of things that they showed is like just so influenced by me. Which you just can't unsee it after you know that. You're like, oh, that's why they look like they do. That's so funny. So yeah, they got approval from military, and the military really saw it as an ad for the Navy.

Dylan 21:57

That's funny that you bring that up because When we started watching it, I was totally thinking in my head, I was like, how much of this is just gonna be like a puff piece for the Navy?

Joe 22:10

Everybody wanted to be their m Maverick or Iceman and no one wanted to be Goose, but Goose was pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah.

Dylan 22:18

All right, Joe. So

Favorite Scenes And Movie Myths

Dylan 22:20

what would you say is some of your favorite scenes?

Joe 22:25

So one of the funniest scenes is Did you recognize a couple people from different movies that we've done?

Dylan 22:34

Yeah.

Joe 22:36

For sure. Me and my brother, when the You've Lost That Loving Filling comes up, and he Tom Cruise is singing to Kelly McGillis and all that. Me and my brother would just bust up at the guy who comes after Goose and Maverick are done, and he does the baby, I get down on my days for you. And we would just like the funny thing about him is he's also the guy who says the quarterback is toast and diehard. Oh yeah. So it kind of brought that back to me as we were watching it again because me and my brother would rewind and watch him on both movies. Whenever we would watch it, we'd have to re rewind the tape and then watch it again. So yeah, that's probably one of my favorite ones. Let's see.

Dylan 23:35

I think the dogfight training, like all of that was just so good. The shots of the aircraft flying around and just the maneuvers that they were doing. It's like oh so good.

Joe 23:50

Yeah, yeah, a lot of that stuff. Just even the opening shot that apparently the studios didn't love, it just immerses you into that culture.

Dylan 24:01

Yeah.

Joe 24:01

And it just their part of their strategy too was like in Star Wars, where George George Lucas is like, you're just gonna be immersed in this. I'm not gonna tell you what a Jedi is, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna let you figure it out. They just took all the military terminology and just put it in there without explaining it. Yeah.

Dylan 24:21

And so you just kind of start to see oh, this is that, and this is the other thing, and this is cool, and you know, it just yeah, uh they just really throw you in, and so you just get go on this ride of and with that opening carrier scene, how even if they didn't like how it was shot, but it's like it really makes you feel like you're picking up in the middle of it. This story is already going on and happening, yeah.

Joe 24:53

Yeah, so James Tolkien plays Stinger, which is the captain on the ship or whatever. I love him because he's Strickland and Back to the Future. Yeah, but it's cool to see him in another role where he's still got that authority, but he's a still he's way more lax in comparison to Strickland. But yeah, they go in there and they're like when they become when they basically are told, hey, cougar's out, you guys are in. That's just a cool moment. Because it's knowing too that this is the elite of the elite. It wasn't just they kind of play it to be like, oh, you guys kind of fell into this. It's like, no, these guys were, you know, yeah, like on that ship of all the pilots, they were chosen to do that. So it's it's really a cool, almost reward for them, even after they done what they'd done.

Dylan 25:45

Yeah, flipping the bird and all that, which is a hilarious moment.

Joe 25:50

It's funny because the pilots who helped on the movie said that they would run into other pilots from other countries and stuff like that. But if it was the Russians, they would hold up some vodka or say hi. They were very friendly because they're like, This is somebody else's war. We're just doing what we're supposed to. So, yeah, you know you shouldn't be here, so you should go, you know, kind of thing. And so it's really funny where yeah, that he kind of pulls that maneuver. Yeah. So yeah, they like when they filmed this, there was still the Cold War going on, and they it's probab part of why they put the Russians, but what was up with the volleyball game? Going along with kind of going along with that Calvin Klein kind of thing, yeah. Like Tony Scott wanted to give something for women to look at. So they wanted to get as many times as they could to show stuff like that. And so, like some of the other tropes that aren't real is like the top gun trophy is not a real thing, yeah. But also like they never showered together, and there was no locker rooms, like they totally put this together because they wanted more people would associate the team kind of camaraderie with sports, and so they had to, if they wanted to do certain dialogue that wasn't going to be around their superiors, then you have locker room talk, and so then they could bust each other's chops and stuff like that. You're dangerous, Maverick. Right. I'm dangerous, yeah. So yeah, that volleyball scene was just another excuse to oil the guys

Behind The Scenes Wild Facts

Joe 27:54

up.

Dylan 27:54

All right, Joe, let's get into some more behind-the-scenes nuggets.

Joe 27:58

Yeah, one of the cool things is that the original name for Maverick was gonna be Evan. And so he's they finally basically called him Pete Maverick Mitchell. And uh sorry, but it was later changed to Pete as an homage to Pete Pettigrew, who worked on the film, and he was the main consultant on the main pilot that was a consultant. Yeah, it's a cool homage to they had to most I'll say most of the actors, because they were gonna be flying regularly in jets to get certain shots or whatever, they had to go through training, yeah, pilot training. So they had they had to go into an ejection seat and simulate that and go into a room where the oxygen decreases, and so you have to keep your you know wits around you, yeah. So they had to do all that stuff, and Val Kilmer didn't have to because he decided he didn't want to go on the jets and be on all that. Oh, yeah. He initially was not even wanting to do the film, he had the same agent as Tom Cruise and had heard about it, and all the actors were trying to get on this movie, but he just didn't want to do it and was forced to by contractual obligations. Oh man. So yeah, so then he finally kind of gave in to that. And then what they did, Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer, is they kept tension on the set by not interacting with each other. And so Tom would hang out with the guys or Val would hang out with the guys, but they'd never associate together so that they would keep that kind of separation. Val would do different things to him to try to tick him off, but he said he was the nicest guy he's ever worked with and he couldn't get him to break. See, a cool thing, which I was mentioning, is the film is credited with starting the home video industry. Oh originally VHS tapes were priced at $100 upon their first release because they were mainly sold to video stores.

Dylan 30:23

Oh wow, yeah.

Joe 30:24

Uh the film was priced to own immediately upon release. And interesting. Pepsi bought ad space, so that paid for the makeup of the cost. Yeah. But since then, pricing VHS tapes to own right away became a common practice. Oh, interesting. Yeah. That yeah, I can imagine, like, I've seen the cost of physical media in the past, and it's like spending five hundred dollars on a VHS or a VCR and then spending another 90 bucks to watch Batman at home. That's insane.

Dylan 30:58

Yeah, and especially like now, since we have all of like the streaming stuff, and you only have to own something to watch it, you just have to stream it.

Joe 31:10

Right. Yeah. That's why I'm a big proponent of physical media. Yeah. So Tom Cruise had never rented a motorcycle in the film, and he went to House of Motorcycles in Al Cajon, California to learn. They taught him in the parking lot of their shop. Yeah. And since then, he's been on motorcycles in almost every movie he's done. He usually drove his own motorcycles in the scene. And so at the end of it, they would be like, All right, Tom, we're done with the scene, come back. And he would pull the whole, like, I can't hear you and take off. And so there's one time where he just flew on the handle and took off. And as he was coming back, he ate it. Like he got into the parking lot and ate it. And he got up, he said he got up real fast and was looking around. Who's around here? I don't want, I don't want to get in trouble. And a stunt coordinator came running out and he thought he died. Oh man. So the Tom Cruise said, This never happened, right? He's yeah, okay, this never happened. And then Tom Cruise is 5'7, so he had to wear lifts because Allie McGillis was 5'10. There's so much that so much trickery that goes on. But uh with the pilots or the actors who all had to go up and do the maneuvers and be in the jets and stuff, Anthony Edwards was the only one who didn't throw up. Oh, yeah. Every single one of them puked when they went up initially today. And so they used some people who had worked with Lucasfilms and several other people who had done documentary footage so they knew how to get the right scenes for the jets, and they kept in the camera movement that that you would see in those so that it would feel more like you were either looking behind yourself or and so it was a mix of the aerial footage and they also did blue screen for the actors, yeah, as for the close-up shots, and they would do b-roll footage in the air and film that and then put that behind them. But yeah, they would do models, and they were so used to with Lucasfilms, like trying to preserve all the models, and so it was unheard of to create these jet models and then blow them up, or yeah, when they do that spin when they're yeah, they go in that flat spin. They did it several times and almost broke a camera doing it. But yeah, it's a mix of models and real stuff, and even their maneuvers, like they're saying that there's certain roles that you do when you when you're doing a show, that kind of thing, and you wouldn't actually do it in combat because you'd still get shot. Yeah, and so they threw a lot of those roles in because the directors and stuff thought, oh, that looks cool, let's do that. And so, like the fighting in the scenes are way more overdone, right? Yeah, so I can imagine all the people who enlisted in the Air Force and then decided. Oh, this is totally different, yes, not yeah.

Cultural Impact And Sequel History

Dylan 34:35

So when Top Gun came out, what would you say was like the cultural impact of it?

Joe 34:42

Oh man, I was just thinking today that with the whole theme, I remember it in eight-bit format because we had the Top Gun Nintendo game. And seriously, my brother had aviators, my dad was in the Air Force, so he really owned this movie like aviators, leather jacket. He was funny because it seemed like any military movie that would come out, he would use that persona. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, my brother got to fly in a jet once as a kid because my dad was in the air force. Yeah, crazy. But I remember being at home with posters of jets, and we'd get we I think I have one still, but we got a bunch of die-cast metal jets and stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah. It just with that whole recruitment thing of the movie just blowing that up, everybody was just going to air shows. So you just part of it is what's gonna happen. So yeah, that that was huge. The way that you know, and again, going back to the MTV era of things where the music really influenced movies at the time, and you would watch a movie and then go to the record store and buy this collection of hits and drive and pretend you're Maverick or something. So yeah, again, even as kids throwing that on and hearing that song brings back core memories.

Dylan 36:15

Yeah, and I'm sure that it had such like an influence on like kind of the aviation industry as a whole.

Joe 36:22

Yeah, even Tom Cruise wanting to be a pilot, and John Trafalter eventually became one, and a lot of people had just were like, I want to do this, I want to fly, you know. Yeah, the interesting thing is that they had tried to get a sequel off the ground for years. They just they had scripts, they had all this other stuff, and they're like, How are you guys planning on shooting it? And they're like, We'll just use some of the stuff that you guys filmed, and they're like, We used everything we filmed, yeah. So there was nothing left. They're like, you gotta shoot new footage so you can't just and and so it kept it from development for a long time. Interesting, yeah.

Dylan 37:05

Yeah, because that would definitely be an expensive movie to make.

Joe 37:08

Yeah, definitely. It just it's crazy.

Dylan 37:12

And like Top Gun Maverick came out like decades later.

Joe 37:17

So Yeah.

Dylan 37:19

What what was it, a couple years ago? Yeah, but uh I want to say 18?

Joe 37:28

Yeah, totally, yeah. Yeah, and it's cool how they do a lot of throwback to the first one, and you know, really pay homage to that. And I think one of the coolest parts spoil spoiler if you haven't seen it.

Dylan 37:47

There's another volleyball scene.

Joe 37:48

Yes. My favorite thing is that they that Iceman and and Maverick are still friends, or you know.

Dylan 37:57

Oh really?

Joe 37:58

Yeah, it's just yeah, because the whole movie they're back and forth and forth, and and it's interesting. Yeah, right. Yeah, and it's interesting because it's not like Iceman is jealous, he's just like, dude, you're not doing this right.

Dylan 38:14

You're not as cool as you think you are.

Joe 38:16

You think you're cool, but you're not cool. And even when they go up at the end, he goes to the or their lead officer or whatever, and like, are you sure he's okay to fly right now? Just he's just gone through all this stuff, and they're like, Yes. Then Maverick kind of changes his attitude up there and saves the day. So are you Team Maverick or Team Iceman?

Dylan 38:40

I mean, I think you have to be Team Maverick, right?

Joe 38:43

Yeah, everybody wants to be Maverick. Yeah, it Iceman is the what's kind of like the whole karate kid debate. Yeah. Because you could say Top Gun is about Iceman. Because he won the award. Yeah, yeah. So after seeing Top Gun, did it live up to one of the most iconic movies of the 80s?

Ratings, Legacy, And Sign Off

Dylan 39:12

I would say so. It has such a kind of a big legacy of all of the aviation style, if you will, of the bomber jackets and the aviators and yeah, everything like that.

Joe 39:27

And that created such a culture for not only just Americans in general, but future movies and how they would shoot them and the angles that they would use. They were figuring it out. This is one of the films that where they were figuring it out.

Dylan 39:42

Yeah. I think I would definitely have to probably give it. I'd say probably uh who that's so hard. I'd probably give it an eight out of ten.

Joe 39:54

Okay.

Dylan 39:54

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How about you?

Joe 39:56

Yeah, I think I'm gonna go eight point five. No, I shouldn't.

Dylan 40:01

Here we are again with the point fives.

Joe 40:11

Tim Robbins is in it. There's just a lot of people who are who became stars who became like Academy Award legends that are all in this. Tom Cruise is still at the beginning and of his career, closer to that. And and so, yeah, Val Kilmer is like young and fresh, and there's just so much to this movie with the actors and everything, it's just totally cool.

Dylan 40:35

Yeah.

Joe 40:36

So, Dylan, are you gonna buzz the tower on your way home? Oh yeah.