Even that album went gold.īut though Saturday Night Fever-which is receiving a 40th-anniversary “director’s cut” Blu-Ray release on May 2-is remembered today as a feel-good disco movie, it’s actually a bracingly honest exploration of what it means to be young, horny, broke, and filled with intense feelings you can’t express and don’t understand. How big and broad was Saturday Night Fever’s appeal? In 1978, the Children’s Television Workshop released Sesame Street Fever-a parody whose cover features Grover in John Travolta’s signature pose and Ernie, Bert, and The Cookie Monster standing in for the Bee Gees. Its soundtrack was an even bigger smash-the best-selling album of all time, in fact, until the release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
The white suit John Travolta’s upstart wears for the film’s climactic dance contest instantly became iconic, as did many of the movie’s shots and set pieces.
1977’s Saturday Night Fever, the low-budget ethnography about Italian guys in some of Brooklyn’s sketchier neighborhoods, wasn’t just a movie about disco: it was the movie about disco.
