YMMV / Saturday Night Fever

• Award Snub:
  • The film received one Academy Award nomination (Best Actor), but not Best Picture.
  • Despite having one of the biggest selling soundtracks of all time, none of the songs that The Bee Gees contributed were nominated for Best Song. Not "Stayin' Alive", not "Night Fever", not "How Deep Is Your Love?", not "More Than a Woman", not "If I Can't Have You".
• Awesome Music: There is a reason that the soundtrack album was certified 15x platinum. How awesome was the soundtrack? Alice Cooper remembers panning the album to fans and the public, but privately, thought it was (and still is) the best album he's ever listened to.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Annette's rape scene. It is weirdly out of place even for a 70's disco film, and it is never talked about again.
• Common Knowledge: Because of disco's general reputation in pop culture (at least until the 21st century), most people know this movie only as, "that goofy comedy where John Travolta dances." If you actually watch the movie, you'd know that nothing could possibly be further from the truth.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Despite portraying Tony Manero's life as violent, shallow and ultimately pointless, the movie won Disco millions of new fans.
• Jerkass Woobie: Even Tony deserves a little sympathy for all the crap he has to put up with.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Most of the people who saw the film in The '70s cared only for The Bee Gees songs and Travolta's dance numbers.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • In possibly one of the strangest crossbred memes in Internet history, this film plays a major part in a Touhou Project meme: Travolta's pose from the poster is extremely similar to the pose taken by Nagae Iku when she declares a spellcard, and fans did the rest. The meme is so prolific that Danbooru, usually dedicated to anime, manga, and video games, has tags for Saturday Night Fever and John Travolta.
  • "Staying Alive" is popularly used in CPR training due to having the perfect beat for chest compressions, and even today most people at least know the song and it's beat, whether they like the song or not. Check out this educational video featuring Vinnie Jones.
  • Tony strutting down the street to "Staying Alive".
• Moral Event Horizon: Many viewers cannot forgive Tony for attempting to rape Stephanie, and then just giving up on helping save Annette from being raped by Double J and Joey (which also qualifies as their Moral Event Horizon).
• Narm Charm: A lot of Travolta's moves, which have been endlessly parodied, come off as ridiculous and are hard to take with a straight face, but they are really cool anyway and Tony Manero exudes an engaging charisma.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The massive gang fight breaking out between Tony and his gang and and the Barracudas.
  • Tony attempting to force himself on Stephanie.
  • Annette being gang-raped by Joey and Double J while drunk and high on ecstasy. Her audible protests against the acts forced upon her and Tony doing nothing to stop it from happening doesn't help either. What if they weren't using protection? Considering she wasn't "fixed", what if she had gotten pregnant from the rapes? And considering the film's time period, what if she or the guys had gotten AIDS or some other type of diseases?
  • Bobby C.'s death falling from a great height off the bridge onto the cold waters below. Consider how many people in real life have fallen to their deaths like that. Whether it was suicide or accidental from being under the influence at the time.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Fran Drescher has a minor role; she often commented about being in the film as a strange route to stardom.
  • Denny Dillon also has a minor role.
  • The soundtrack includes the disco remix of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, "A Fifth Of Beethoven," by one Walter Murphy, who'd later go on to be the regular composer for Family Guy.
• Sequelitis: Stayin' Alive, the original film's much maligned 1983 sequel, has gotten this reaction in spades. Quite a bit of fans think of it as at least being So Bad, It's Good (olden Raspberry Award founder John Wilson's book The Official Razzie Movie Guide put it in the "100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made" list). Plenty of viewers, however, can't stand it in the slightest (the sequel has a whopping 0% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes).
• Signature Scene: Tony confidently strutting down the street in the opening credits, set to The Bee Gees' "Staying Alive", has become one of the most oft-parodied scenes in movies.
• Unintentional Period Piece: When people think of The '70s, they think of this movie. When they think of this movie, they think of the 70s.
  • Except that the styles, fashions, and vehicles in the film are actually very much mid-to-late-70s. Early-70s style, fashion, and vehicles still held the ghosts of the late-60s. And disco didn't start until the mid-70s, gaining traction around 1975-1976, just a year or two before Saturday Night Fever was released.
• The Woobie:
  • Bobby C.. Tony is the only one who treats him vaguely like a human being.
  • Tony's brother comes across as really sympathetic after leaving the priesthood.

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