The Best Musical Moments In Non-Musical Movies Are…
After spending the summer binge-watching films instead of swimming at (_________________) {you fill in the blank}, we came up with a sorta "new" category that might come in handy on some distant future trivia night competition. Maybe.
"Beetlejuice" (1988) - "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)". Gotta be one of weirdo-director Tim Burton's most memorable movie-set-pieces, and that's sayin' something! Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis as ghosts trying to scare the new owners of their house by possessing them to the tune of Harry Belafonte's iconic recording is sheer cinematic genius.
"Young Frankenstein" (1974) - "Puttin' On The Ritz". Gene Wilder's Dr. Frankenstein and Peter Boyle's Monster, both elegantly dressed, perform for a well-to-do audience and it goes along just fine until the big guy, frightened by a bursting stage light, ends up going berserk. Stupidly charming, actually.
"Back To The Future" (1985) - "Johnny B. Goode". Michael J. Fox has his best movie moment ever, leading the band at the dance through a "just follow me" cover of the Chuck Berry classic. When it's time for the guitar solo, he goes over-the-top bonkers channeling Townshend and Hendrix. "Your kids are gonna love it," he says. The guy looking at what just happened to his guitar is a priceless bit, too.
"2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) - "Daisy" (or "Daisy Bell, A Bicycle Built For Two"). When the computer in charge of everything on the ship malfunctions, it's up to lone surviving astronaut Keir Dullea to disconnect it. What follows is one of cinema's strangest (and creepy) movie "deaths" ever, as HAL (the computer) sings the song that it learned at programming school while slowly...slowly...fading away. We file this one under "prophetically chilling".
Honorable Mentions: Tom Cruise lip-synching "Old Time Rock and Roll" in "Risky Business" (1983), the "Come And Get Your Love" dance montage in Marvel's "Guardians Of The Galaxy" (2014), and Tom Cruise again, this time in "Rain Man" (1988) mumbling his way through "I Saw Her Standing There" to his brother Dustin Hoffman, which turns out to be an epic, life-changing epiphany.