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With the sheer abundance of rereleases, reboots, reimaginings, sequels and poorly de-aged legacy stars, it’s difficult to forget about the ’80s’ most prevalent films. Whether it’s Indiana Jones, The Goonies or Top Gun, these movies have managed to stay in the cultural zeitgeist for generations. Eighties cinema has had an undeniable effect on current film tradition, and discussion on the topic has yet to cease. Yet for those looking to better contextualize the films of the era with an understanding of the world at the time of their release, finding one place for such information can be daunting.
Lisa Molinelli and Dustin Morrow contextualize this history on their ’80s cinema podcast, The Long Rewind. The Portlanders like to take the decade one year at a time, often spending multiple episodes covering just one year to establish a broader understanding of the time when the films were released. The Long Rewind started in March, and has already released 22 episodes.
While talking about the era’s films, Molinelli and Morrow delve into its politics, fashion, sport, literature and anything else relevant to fully understanding each film at the time.
“I listened to a bunch of ’80s movie podcasts before we started ours, and that was something completely missing from all of them,” Morrow says.
Morrow is a filmmaker and a professor of film at Portland State University. Molinelli, Morrow’s partner in podcast and life, is an author, researcher and librarian at Portland Community College. The couple make for an interesting dynamic duo of analysis, since their personal histories lend themselves well to the topic.
“She is very good at framing the historical context of it, where I bring a little more of a filmmaker, film history background to it,” Morrow says of Molinelli.
The duo idealizes the ’80s not solely because of childhood nostalgia, but also because of the sheer abundance of groundbreaking, character-focused work made during the period.
“The biggest movies of all time now are Avatar and Avengers Endgame,” Morrow says. “Nothing against those movies, those movies are fine, but they are parades of special effects and spectacle. In the ’80s, the biggest movie of all time was a very low-budget, tender movie about an alien who comes to Earth, befriends a little boy, and helps him deal with his parents’ divorce. That’s a very different era.”
When not covering individual years, The Long Rewind also tackles more self-contained topics. Upcoming episode topics include slasher films, the emergence of special effects, and an analysis of the odd trend of ninjas and break dancing in ’80s movies.
The Long Rewind is a podcast focused on education through entertainment, something in which Morrow has more than enough experience. In his 12 years teaching at PSU, Morrow has been able to gauge an understanding of how young people perceive the ’80s. “I’m always amazed that they know all the movies because these movies came out 40-plus years ago,” Morrow says. “They know E.T., they know Blade Runner, they know The Thing, they know Poltergeist. What they don’t know is that all of those movies came out within seven days of each other.”
The Long Rewind is new, and it’s still growing. While Molinelli and Morrow are far from being celebrity podcasters, they’re happy to provide a deeper understanding of how culture impacts film.
“It’s a niche, and I think that’s what podcasting does really well. One of the reasons I thought podcasting would work well for this medium is that there’s a podcast out there for every interest you could possibly have in life,” Morrow says.
LISTEN: The Long Rewind streams every Wednesday on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Radio Public, Pocket Casts, Overcast, iHeartRadio, Castbox, Podcast Addict, Castro, Deezer, PodBean, Listen Notes, and AntennaPod.