The 1984 Breakdancing Extravaganza Breakin' is Pure Fun
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
About seven years ago I was let go from The Dissolve shortly before the site went out of business. I had a six month old baby, no freelance career to speak of and a relationship with my publisher Scribner that had unfortunately come to an end several years earlier with the release of my third and final book for them, 2013’s You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me.
It was terrifying and dread-inducing and a little bit exciting because it represented a new start and freedom. Glorious, scary freedom. I talked to a lot of people and lined up a whole bunch of columns that died one by one like supporting characters in a murder mystery and did some freelancing.
I wouldn’t begin Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place for another two years so I wrote for other people and other places. I’ve forgotten most of the pieces I wrote during that in-between time but some stand out in my mind, like an article for Esquire about the Shout Factory release of Breakin’ and Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo.
It’s possible that this assignment stands out in my mind because it prominently involves the words “Electric Boogaloo”, the most unforgettable and iconic phrase in the English language.
But it’s more likely that it sticks out because I remember how goddamned happy I felt watching those ridiculous movies with my six month old son Declan at a time when I was deeply depressed and fearful about the future.
It was a glorious reminder of the life-affirming power of pop culture escapism. It reconnected me with the sense of joy that can come with even the most vulgar and ridiculous pop art.
I didn’t like Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo as much as its predecessor but Breakin’ gave me so much joy the last time I saw it and this time as well that it doesn’t seem fair to cheapen that pleasure by labeling it as tongue-in-cheek or ironic.
I legitimately love the breakdancing-themed Breakin’ for many reasons but one of them is its liberating lack of pretension. The screenplay juxtaposes the snooty world of the dance establishment with the revolutionary and riotously joyful new wave of breakdancers, pop lockers and street dancers and asks which, ultimately is better.
You’re not going to see Alvin Ailey doing this!
I’ll tell you which is better: breakdancing. The world of ballet and opera and all that hoity toity uptight shit is pretentious and full of itself. It’s a bunch of fancy lads and uptown girls who went to college and, to a person, think that they’re better than me.
The breakdancing world, in sharp contrast, is full of talented street dancers with names like O-Zone and Turbo who are willing to risk it all on a dream.
Israeli shlock factory Cannon captured lightning in a bottle with Breakin’ and came up big at the box office, grossing nearly forty million dollars on a budget of just over a million dollars.
Breakin’ was a cornball exploitation movie joyously alive with the energy and electricity of hip hop culture in all of its forms, but particularly hip hop and break dancing.
Hip hop in Breakin’ is represented in no small part by an ambitious and charismatic rapper and actor who would play a seminal role in the creation of gangsta rap but deftly plays the party MC amping up the dancers in multiple scenes here: Ice-T.
Where other movies treated breakdancing, and rap for that matter, as a fad and a gimmick to be crassly exploited before it faded forever into insignificance, Breakin’ treats break-dancing as an art form and the main event.
It might have come from a place of cynical commercial calculation but it resulted in an essential work of pop sociology, an important document of a time and place and subculture that’s also spectacularly entertaining.
In his signature role, legendary breakdancer and choreographer Adolfo "Shabba Doo" Quiñones plays Orlando "Ozone" Barco, a passionate street dancer and purist who doesn’t want to compromise for the sake of a corrupt and cruel world.
Breakdancing is an inherently joyful form of entertainment but Quiñones burns with an angry intensity. His professional name may be Shabba Doo and he may habitually rock a half shirt and dangling pirate earring but he conveys dignity and pride all the same.
AND he is electric in the film’s wall-to-wall breakdancing scenes, poetry in motion, the perfect combination of explosive kinetic energy and total control. We don’t need any of the film’s earnest propaganda about breakdancing being a real art form worthy of respect because that’s apparent in every hypnotic dance sequence.
Michael “Boogaloo Shrimp” Chambers costars as Ozone’s sidekick and dancing partner Tony "Turbo" Ainley. Hip Hop is a macho culture but the breakdancers in Breakin’ run the gamut from mildly to extremely effeminate and flamboyant.
In Chambers’ big scene he synthesizes dancing with sweeping in a manner that’s a bravura display of craft but also a staggeringly ineffective way to clean the street.
Turbo and Ozone team up with classically trained dancer Kelly "Special K" Bennett (Lucinda Dickey) to take breakdancing places it’s never been. But do they have the drive to make it to the top?
It’s tempting to say that Breakin’ is full of gratuitous breakdancing sequences but when the whole goddamn point is to show hungry young kids strutting their stuff concepts like “gratuitous” don’t apply.
It’s ironic that the phrase “Boogaloo” would be coopted by the Alt-Right because Breakin’ is not just an extremely homoerotic affair; it’s fundamentally queer in its aesthetic, attitude and fashion not to mention aggressively multicultural, interracial, black, Jewish and inextricably urban.
Breakin and its sequel, whose subtitle escapes me at the moment, represent everything that the Boogaloo boys hate. It’s the “This is the future Liberals want” meme in cinematic form.
Breakin’ is pure hokum, a never-ending parade of dance movie cliches served straight and shameless. But it’s also pure pleasure, a crackerjack piece of entertainment that was a surprise blockbuster that delivers big time in every conceivable way.
Breakin’ is not iconic and enduring despite being cheesy, campy and corny; it’s iconic and enduring because it’s so cheesy, campy and gloriously, transcendently corny.
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