YMMV / Risky Business

• Awesome Music:
  • Bob Seger. "Old Time Rock and Roll." If you got the hardwood floor, you may strip to your underwear, socks and pink business button-shirt, and proceed to dance.
  • The soundtrack by Tangerine Dream. Especially a signature track "Love On a Real Train."
  • Best use of Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy"... well outside of GoodFellas.
    • or Better Off Dead.
  • Mixed in are songs from that time period by Journey, Prince, and oh yeah Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" which was required by law to be on every soundtrack between 1982 to 1987.
    Joel's Dad: A preponderance of bass, perhaps?
• Best Known for the Fanservice: The movie is remembered for two things: The "Risky Business" Dance, and Rebecca De Mornay's sex scenes with Tom Cruise. (Well, men who were teens when the movie came out remember them fondly. They may seem a little tame by today's standards.)
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • When the Princeton interviewer is going over Joel's school records, Lana is standing nearby listening to all of the things Joel's done to get his chance at a good college. The look on her face suggests she's seriously falling in love with Joel.
  • The following scene where she offers to take Joel to the city's Elevated train so they can "make love on a real train" when Joel is upset that he failed getting into Princeton. And the way the scene is filmed makes it seem less about sex and more like actual love-making.
  • When Joel's father approaches him at movie's end to let Joel know he made it into Princeton, and that he's genuinely proud of his son.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Most will go into this movie only having seen the iconic "Old Time Rock and Roll" dance, so they watch the movie for this scene, and expect the movie to have that similar upbeat tone, but that scene occurs early in the movie and everything that follows fits more into the Crime/Drama genre than it does '80s Comedy.
• Mandela Effect: Everyone knows about the iconic scene in Risky Business where Joel dances around the house in a shirt, socks and sunglasses. Except he wasn't actually wearing sunglasses in the scene. He's also wearing a pink shirt in the scene, while parodies almost always have the person wearing a white shirt.
• Signature Scene:
  • Tom Cruise dancing, in socks, underwear, and business shirt, to "Old Time Rock and Roll", so much so that it has its own trope.
  • The "love on a real train" sex scene is a solid runner-up, particularly due to Tangerine Dream's score.
• Tear Jerker: Lana’s backstory: She ran away because her stepfather was sexually harassing her, and she left a little brother behind. She seems to believe that sex work is the only thing she can do, as she’s not even trying to go back to school or do anything for the future.
• Technology Marches On: Barry's invention, the "Memo-Minder", was rendered obsolete on January 1, 1984, when the original AT&T monopoly was shattered, and customers could begin purchasing and installing their own telephone equipment, including affordable and easy-to-use answering machines.
  • Then, by 2004, answering machines themselves would be shelved in favor of a cell phone's voicemail, which would in turn see a serious decline by 2014 with the rise of instant messaging (IM). In three decades, we leaped from hand-written memos, to answering machines, to voicemail, to IM.
• Values Dissonance/STD Immunity: Unprotected sex with hookers = harmless fun/male rite of passage. The movie came out just before the HIV/AIDS scare went nationwide.

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