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There was another constant. No matter how early Breakin' was started, I was always out like a light before the halfway mark. Breakin' 2 could be started at three in the morning and then rewound and started again 94 minutes later and I would somehow find the energy to keep my eyeballs open for the duration. It was an unscientific experiment perhaps, but repeating it this week produced similar results. Breakin' was a film to be endured, even at 7:30 in the evening (or as my girlfriend wondered aloud, "Why in God's name am I watching this?") and Breakin' 2 was an overdose of candy on Halloween night or Easter morning. It needs to be seen on its own for maximum pleasure. The VHS cover for Breakin' 2 is a living testament to this kind of sugar buzz overkill. The three leads are posed (in mid -pop and/or lock) and placed around the perimeter of a sneaker so deliriously neon it seems headed for a Three Mile Island-ish nuclear meltdown. I only noticed when doing research this week that the sneaker is actually glowing because it has prongs at the bottom and is meant to be "plugged in" a la a nightlight or some incredible childhood toy the likes of which we have not yet encountered.

There is another thread connecting a number of the videos I mentioned above. The Ninja trilogy and the Breakin' films were all produced by Cannon pictures, a company run at the tail end of the ‘70s and most of the ‘80s by cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. They financed a lot of Chuck Norris' output in that decade (particularly the Missing in Action films), a good number of Charles Bronson's oeuvre (Death Wish II and Ten to Midnight to cite a few) and a mishmash of other exploitation type fare (Hot Resort, Making the Grade, The Exterminator 2, the King Solomon's Mines remake with Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone). I seem to recall that I was fairly aware as a child of the Golan Globus brand and what it stood for (crazy action, goofy plots, bare-breasted women, hours of entertainment).

As a subset of that and a way to lead into an actual discussion of Boogaloo, it must be noted that of the three ninja films and the two break dancing films, 60% shared the same director and the same leading lady. Sam Firstenberg (nee Schmulik Firstenberj) directed Revenge of the Ninja, Breakin' 2 and Ninja III: The Domination all in the same year, which is kind of like Bob Clark churning out Porky's II: The Next Day and A Christmas Story back-to-back in 1983. Lucinda Dickey starred in both Breakin' films and Ninja III in the same year before disappearing into the Hollywood sunset (Kind of. It seems she has been married to one of the executive producers of Survivor for a number of years, which is a coincidence that means nothing, I know, not in Hollywood, but somehow suggests levels of profundity to me.).

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