With thousands of movies made since the dawn of the medium, it’s hard to stand out and make history. A select few works have, though. 1888’s Roundhay Garden Scene is, as best as we know, the oldest surviving film. 1939’s Gone with the Wind is frequently cited as the highest-grossing movie of all time when adjusted for inflation. In the history of cinema, the 1986 classic Top Gun has the shirtless, oil-chested beach volleyball scene with the highest HFPM (high-fives per minute).
There are at least two things about the latter film that shouldn’t be ignored, even still today. The first is that in the volleyball scene, Tom Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is wearing jeans while physically exerting himself outside during a hot San Diego summer. Furthermore, immediately after he stops playing, while still glistening with sweat, he throws on a T-shirt and a fur-collared leather jacket, as if begging for a sticky heat stroke. The second is the soundtrack.
Top Gun is one of the most overtly Eighties movies. It has over-the-top machismo, Cold War-era patriotism, super-stylized visuals, and Tom Cruise in aviator shades. (Also incredibly of the era is the list of actors who were supposedly considered for Cruise’s role: Matthew Modine, Emilio Estevez, Sean Penn, Patrick Swayze, Ralph Macchio, Charlie Sheen, Rob Lowe, and Michael J. Fox.) The music pushes the flick over the top: Cheap Trick, Gloria Estefan’s Miami Sound Machine, Loverboy, Kenny Loggins, and Berlin are all on the soundtrack. The ten-song album is full of in-your-face guitars prominently accompanied by vibrant synths. If you could only pick one album to encapsulate Eighties music, the only thing better would be one of those decade compilation CDs, the ones advertised via the cheesy TV commercials with the classic blue “send check or money order to” screen at the end.
The album hit shelves on May 15, 1986, and was one of the year’s biggest releases, topping the Billboard 200 chart for five non-consecutive weeks. The project can be summarized by two songs that aren’t just the biggest on the album, but two of the most memorable pop hits of the entire decade. Both were actually written by the same two people: Italian composer and producer Giorgio Moroder, who younger fans might know best from Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories song “Giorgio by Moroder,” and Tom Whitlock, who met Moroder by chance and seized his opportunity: While fixing Moroder’s Ferrari, he told the producer he was a lyricist (which he was), so Moroder invited him to collaborate and Whitlock ended up with writing credits on multiple soundtrack cuts.
Among them was “Danger Zone,” which is the most enduring part of the soundtrack. It’s at least the most-streamed, with 689 million plays on Spotify. The way Loggins explained it in a 2013 interview, Toto was originally meant to perform the track, but legal issues caused that plan to fall through. Meanwhile, Loggins was already in the studio, as he wrote and performed the song “Playing with the Boys,” the one that plays during that aforementioned beach volleyball scene. A singer for “Danger Zone” was apparently needed right away, so Loggins stepped in. In a later interview, Loggins said it was Jefferson Starship who were initially offered the song. Either way, he didn’t foresee the track’s success, saying, “At the time, it seemed like a pretty simple piece of rock and roll.” Fans thought more highly of it, as the song, the first single released from the soundtrack, reached #2 on the Hot 100 chart.
That song ended up being the gateway to Moroder and Whitlock’s other Top Gun success story, “Take My Breath Away.” In 2020, Moroder explained, “I did ‘Danger Zone’ for the film, and they liked it, then [Jerry Bruckheimer, a co-producer of the movie] said they needed something slow for the romantic scenes with Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis. I set a click to a slow tempo and made a rough demo playing everything. I sang the melody over it, but was torn between two slightly different sections. At home, I listened again and chose the one we know. […] I played it as an instrumental from beginning to end, and I loved it.”
Martha Davis from the new wave band The Motels was initially approached to sing “Take My Breath Away,” but the producers weren’t feeling it. At the time, Moroder had been working with a new group called Berlin, so he had them give it a shot. Their version ended up being the version in the film. It wasn’t expected to be a hit. The band’s manager promised singer Terri Nunn that if the song cracked the top 10 of the Hot 100, he’d cut his hair into a mohawk. Well, he ended up having to grab the clippers, as “Take My Breath Away” peaked at #1 for a week in September 1986. Today, it’s only just behind “Danger Zone” in Spotify streams with 649 million.
No other songs from Top Gun reached these ubiquitous cultural heights, but a few of them were significantly successful in their own ways. Loggins’ aforementioned “Playing with the Boys” peaked at #60 on the Hot 100, while Loverboy’s “Heaven in Your Eyes” went as high as #12. “Top Gun Anthem,” a collaboration between composer Harold Faltermeyer and Billy Idol guitarist/co-writer Steve Stevens, won a Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Performance. At least one song not from the soundtrack was directly impactful in the plot of the film. In a scene that adds some dimension to Cruise’s Maverick character, he hears Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” and reminisces about how he got sick of the breezy tune after his mother played it over and over. The song was later included on expanded re-releases of the soundtrack.
Top Gun is a larger-than-life kind of movie, one that serves as a cultural benchmark for what its era was like. Few films have a single line as iconic as, “I feel the need… the need for speed!” At the time, it was hard to separate the film from its classic soundtrack songs. I don’t remember myself; in 1986, I wasn’t paying much attention to pop culture due to not being alive yet. For people like me born after then, though, “Danger Zone” and “Take My Breath Away” are likely iconic Eighties songs. The fact that they both came from Top Gun is an interesting piece of trivia. That might be part of what makes the soundtrack such a standout. Forty years later, it and the movie don’t need the shared association to be remembered as great. Together, though, they bring each other, and the art of sweaty beach volleyball, to new heights.
Derrick Rossignol is a writer and editor whose work covering music, video games, and other areas of pop culture has appeared in publications like The A.V. Club, The Boston Globe, CBR, The Guardian, Nintendo Life, and Uproxx.
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