Top Of The Pops The Story Of 1988
Carol
The TvN drama which came out in 2015 has taught me much more about South Korea than any other Korean drama. The show took me back in time where landline phones, Walkman, cassettes, video games were the norm.
Reply 1988 is rife with 80s pop culture references, the 80s advertisement jingles, Seoul Olympics 1988, MBS College Music Festival of 1988 when Shin Hae Chul sang his blockbuster To You. The series introduced me to some of the greatest Korean classics, like Hyewadong by Zoo, Youth by Sanullim, and other artists like Lee Seung Hwan, Sobangcha. The entire playlist of Reply 1988 is a history lesson in music which I also found to be more appealing than modern-day K-pop.
Above all, Reply 1988 is a story about friendship, about love, about youth, and about the good old days. The drama really grips you from the first episode and will keep you engaged till the very last episode. It urges you to cherish your youth and value time and relationships.
Modern history of Korea is something that not many people are aware of maybe because the US played an active role in stifling democracy in one of its own partner countries. Also because much attention was being paid to Cold War and the so-called vices of communism in the eighties. Hence it is through dramas and movies and pop culture that one can get a glimpse of history from a different perspective.
Reply 1988 is the third and the most recent installment in the early Reply series (Reply 1997, Reply 1994) created by Lee Woo-jeong and directed by Shin Won-ho. The creators are known for their slice of life dramas unlike typical Korean dramas which have a conventional villain, and revolve around a budding romance of a man and a woman. The heart and soul of Reply 1988 are its characters played by very talented and actors who took us back in time even though most of them were born in the 90s.
This year the Reply creators gave us Hospital Playlist another drama on friendship of five surgeons in Seoul and their daily ordeals of dealing with patients and their relatives. Unlike dramatic scenes of blood-spewing patients and doctors jumping on the operation table to resuscitate them, Hospital Playlist is one of the most real depiction of daily lives of surgeons, and resident doctors who barely get any time to eat, sleep, or think about dating.
In 1988, Top of the Pops turned 25. A celebration of the best music that year including interviews with Matt Goss, Jason Donovan, Wendy James, Aswad, Cold Cut, All About Eve and Wee Papa Girl Rappers.
The charts are full of sparkling box-fresh pop stars, from tweenage heartthrobs Bros (cue the screaming!) to the boy and girl next door we shared teatime with every weekday - our favourite Neighbours Kylie and Jason.
Stock, Aitken and Waterman have reached their zenith with wall-to-wall hits. In stark contrast to the hosts of wholesomeness, Transvision Vamp put the grrr into girl and those Wee Papa Girl Rappers give great dance hall ragga in a British spin on hip-hop.
While pop reached a new purple phase, the older kids were out at Acid House parties, buying records that sent S'Express and Yazz with Cold Cut to the top of the charts - much to the bemusement and then alarm of the grown-ups.
Aswad were the sound of the summer with a surprise smash hit after years flying the red, gold and green for British reggae, the Mission brought towering bombast to Television Centre, and All About Eve endured perhaps the most famous tumbleweed moment in the show's history. But which of our guests admits to an ecstatically enhanced Top of the Pops appearance in 1988? Clue: it's not Cliff.
Tokyo Pop (トーキョー ポップ[2], Tōkyō Poppu) is a 1988 musical romantic comedy film directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui, who co-wrote the screenplay with Lynn Grossman. The film follows a young American singer (Carrie Hamilton) who travels to Tokyo and meets a local rock musician (Yutaka Tadokoro), with whom she develops a romantic and musical connection. It contrasts American customs with Tokyo lifestyles, while presenting an evolving love story between the two main characters.[3]
In real life, Tadokoro fronted the 1980s rock group Red Warriors, who also star in the film as themselves. Other notable actors include Michael Cerveris, Gina Belafonte, and Tetsurō Tamba, with an uncredited cameo by Japanese rock band X Japan.
Wendy Reed is a young aspiring singer in New York City who sings backup in her boyfriend Mike's band. After a gig, Wendy is furious to learn that Mike is planning to replace her with another female singer. The next day, she receives a postcard from a friend who lives in Tokyo. Disillusioned with the local music scene and having heard of American musicians achieving success in Japan, Wendy steals Mike's rent money and impulsively flies to Tokyo to visit her friend. However, shortly after arriving, Wendy discovers that her friend has moved to Thailand, forcing her to move into a low-rent hostel for gaijin (foreigners) in Itabashi and take a job as a hostess at a karaoke bar.
One night, after missing the last train to Itabashi and failing to get a taxi, Wendy meets a charismatic young man named Hiro Yamaguchi, the leader of a struggling rock band. When a disheartened Wendy vents about needing money for a hotel room, Hiro misinterprets the situation and takes her to a love hotel, angering her. She sleeps in the bathtub and leaves the next morning. Some time later, Wendy and Hiro run into each other again in Yoyogi Park; this time, they hit it off and soon begin a relationship. As they become acquainted with each other, Hiro confesses to Wendy that he has written a few original songs in Japanese, despite his fascination with Western popular culture and the fact that his band only performs covers of classic American songs.
As the band achieves commercial success with a cover version of the Lovin' Spoonful's "Do You Believe in Magic", Wendy and Hiro move into a lavish apartment together. One night at a nightclub, a modeling agent cautions Wendy that being a gaijin singer in Japan is a passing fad, and questions the longevity of her career due to ever-changing trends in Japan. Wendy, tired of her status as a gaijin, tells Hiro that she wants to quit the band and return home, and encourages him to perform his original material at the music festival. She agrees to watch the band's performance at the festival, and is moved to tears as Hiro sings one of his original songs as frontman.
The soundtrack was released in 1988 on CD,[4] cassette,[5] and vinyl LP[6] by RIC Records. It features all the original songs written for the film and performed by Hamilton and Tadokoro, as well as other artists featured in the film.
In honor of the film's 35th anniversary, a 4K restoration of Tokyo Pop was released by Kino Lorber in New York City at BAM Rose Cinemas on August 4, 2023, and in Los Angeles at the American Cinematheque on August 11, followed by a national expansion.[8] The restoration was released on Blu-ray on December 5, 2023.[9]
Top of the Pops (TOTP) is a British music chart television programme, made by the BBC and broadcast weekly between 1 January 1964 and 30 July 2006. The programme was the world's longest-running weekly music show. For most of its history, it was broadcast on Thursday evenings on BBC One. Each show consisted of performances of some of the week's best-selling popular music records, usually excluding any tracks moving down the chart, including a rundown of that week's singles chart. This was originally the Top 20, though this varied throughout the show's history. The Top 30 was used from 1969, and the Top 40 from 1984.
Dusty Springfield's "I Only Want to Be with You" was the first song featured on TOTP, while the Rolling Stones were the first band to perform, with "I Wanna Be Your Man".[4] Snow Patrol were the last act to play live on the weekly show when they performed their single "Chasing Cars".[5] Status Quo made more appearances than any other artist, with a total of 87 (the first was with "Pictures of Matchstick Men" in 1968 and last with "The Party Ain't Over Yet" in 2005).[6][7]
Special editions were broadcast on Christmas Day (and usually, until 1984, a second edition a few days after Christmas), featuring some of the best-selling singles of the year and the Christmas number one. Although the weekly show was cancelled in 2006,[8] the Christmas special continued annually. End-of-year round-up editions have also been broadcast on BBC1 on or around New Year's Eve, albeit largely featuring the same acts and tracks as the Christmas Day shows.[9][10][11] In a change of format, the festive specials did not return in 2022 or 2023 and were replaced by an end-of-year review show on BBC Two. It also survives as Top of the Pops 2, which began in 1994 and features vintage performances from the Top of the Pops archives. Though TOTP2 ceased producing new episodes since 2017, repeats of older episodes are still shown.
Bill Cotton devised the name Top of the Pops.[16] Cotton, Johnnie Stewart and Stanley Dorfman devised the rules which governed how the show would operate: the programme would always end with the number one record, which was the only record that could appear in consecutive weeks. The show would include the highest new entry and (if not featured in the previous week) the highest climber on the charts, and omit any song going down in the chart.[17][18][1] Tracks could be featured in consecutive weeks in different formats. For example, if a song was played over the chart countdown or the closing credits, then it was acceptable for the act to appear in the studio the following week.
These rules were sometimes interpreted flexibly. It was originally based on the Top 20. By the 1970s, the Top 30 was being used and the show was extended from thirty to forty-five minutes duration and songs that were featured outside the charts were chosen according to Dorfman and his fellow producer's Melvyn Cornish's personal taste and judgement.[19] The rules were more formally relaxed from 1997 when records descending the charts were featured more regularly, possibly as a response to the changing nature of the Top 40 (in the late 1990s and early 2000s climbers in the charts were a rarity, with almost all singles peaking at their debut position).
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