Travolta/Cage Ep. 8 - Staying Alive/Raising Arizona (with Sean Conroy)

Greetings, fellow quarantiners! Hope you’re all staying safe and isolated as COVID-19 ravages the United States. Over here at Travolta/Cage, we’ve got another terrible affliction to deal with — disco fever! For this week’s episode, podcaster Sean Conroy (Sean Conroy Gets Happier) joins us to talk about Staying Alive and Raising Arizona.

Staying Alive, of course, is the seven-years-too-late sequel to Saturday Night Fever, in which Travolta’s Tony Manero swaps out disco as an escape for a career in Broadway dancing (which, naturally, called for the talents of writer/director Sylvester Stallone). Strip away the grittiness, good dancing, and scintillating interpersonal drama for disco diapers and creaky love-triangle melodrama and what do you get? Well… this.

Raising Arizona, on the other hand, sees Nic Cage transitioning from hunky weirdo in weepy melodramas to his beautiful-butterfly stage of madman histrionics, teaming up with the Coen brothers for their second(!) film. It’s a madcap Tex Avery-inspired crime comedy about a young couple (Cage and the ever-game Holly Hunter) stealing a baby so they can have a family of their own, and it’s full of all kinds of Coenesque whimsy.

What did we think of these decidedly disparate films? Take a listen and find out!

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