October 18, 2007

Welcome to New Granada

Long before there was Dazed and Confused (a brilliant film in its own right, for me, akin to traveling back in time), there was the original movie about bored, unsupervised teens growing up in the 1970s, called Over the Edge. I saw it when I was around 13 or 14, and it left a big impression on me. Orion Pictures pulled Over the Edge from theaters at the time of its release in 1979, thinking it was too violent. This was a reaction to incidence of minor rioting associated with The Warriors, which had been released earlier that year. Over the Edge would not be seen until 1981 when HBO began showing it, which is where and when I first saw it, and watched it over and over and over again. It struck a nerve.

The creator of this nice fansite (check it out) sums it up thusly:

If you're a member of Generation X, you probably can relate to the 70's movie Over the Edge. This film was and still is one of the most accurate portrayals of teenage life in 1970's suburban America. In fact, the late Kurt Cobain, who related his own life to that of the character Claude Zachary, commented that "Over the Edge pretty much defined my whole personality. It was really cool. Total anarchy."

This is the film's trailer, which gives a taste of what is now its unbelievably classic soundtrack (to this day, I still think of Over the Edge whenever I hear Cheap Trick):


This is the exact same educational film the kids are shown early on in the movie, called "Destruction: Fun or Dumb?". Watch it for at least the theme music:


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I LOVE this movie as well and saw it on HBO in 1981 - we had just gotten cable in Eagle Lake so it was a HUGE deal to me! (Well, WE didn't have cable - my friend's family did so that's where I watched it...) I think about this movie all the time and get excited sometimes when I'm surfing my cable guide and see "Over the Hedge" and then am brought back down to reality that it's hedge with an "H"...

Chris said...

I'm impressed that Eagle Lake had cable as far back as 1981. That's really about the time we got it in Galveston.