More reasons why the 80s were awesome: Sylvester Levay and Morgan Fairchild in Time Bomb

2 November 2010 Rob Buckley Film, US TV 5 Comments

Time Bomb

There are lots of reasons why the 80s were awesome, of course. One of the biggest was American TV of the time, a view of mine that is in no way coloured by nostalgia. Oh no.

But the 1984 TV movie Time Bomb (another reason the 80s was so awesome – US TV used to do movies all the time) is a huge pile of 80s awesome. As if the idea of having Billy Dee Williams driving around in an armoured HGV full of nuclear material (with a very young Lou Diamond Phillips here in an uncredited role) weren’t enough awesome:

  1. It has the music of Sylvester Levay and
  2. It’s from a time when an international terrorist wasn’t automatically a muslim but could, in fact, be French and played by Morgan Fairchild

Now Sylvester Levay isn’t a name you hear much these days. But the Hungarian electrosynth genius was responsible for the theme for Airwolf:

That automatically qualifies him for extreme awesomeness.

But having Morgan Fairchild playing the terrorist. You’d never get that these days, which is why Time Bomb is so very, very awesome.

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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