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Starchaser: The Legend of Orin
Starchaser is an animated sci-fi adventure involving a magical sword and robots and some villain named Zygon… sounds like a mess. The marketing tool for this project was that it was released in 3-D. Reviews were poor and audience response was weak, leading to an opening at #6 behind the long-legged Back to the Future with $1.6 million from 1,020 theaters. Starchaser earned just $3.3 million in the U.S.

Bad Medicine
Steve Guttenberg had two big hits in 1985 with Police Academy 2 and Cocoon, which means this comedy had to be pretty bad to bomb this hard. Guttenberg stars as a med student in Central America who provides medical assistance to the local population with the help of another student played by Julie Hagerty (Elaine from the Airplane! movies). Alan Arkin plays the school’s dean. Bad Medicine opened at #8 behind the last month’s To Live and Die in L.A. with $1.2 million from 731 theaters, and barely doubled that during its short stay in theaters.

White Nights
Making the most of talent and circumstance, White Nights is a drama starring Mikhail Baryshnikov as a ballet dancer who trying to defect from the Soviet Union. He’s forced by the KGB to work with a tap dancer who has defected from the United States, played by Gregory Hines. Helen Mirren plays Baryshnikov's former lover, who helps the two plan to defect to the U.S. (She and the film’s director, Taylor Hackford began their long-term relationship after the movie.)

Baryshnikov had defected from the Soviet Union in the mid 1970s and became a renowned dancer in America, also earning an Oscar nomination for 1977’s The Turning Point. Both he and Hines had received multiple Emmy nominations for their dance performances by the time of this movie. 1985 was a hotbed of U.S.-Soviet Cold War news, with the defection and redefection of KGB agent Vitaly Yurchenko just weeks before the movie was released. The real draw, though, was of course the dance sequences, and the music - Lionel Richie won the Oscar for Best Original Song with “Say You, Say Me,” with “Separate Lives” performed by Phil Collins receiving a nomination as well. White Nights opened this weekend at 21 theaters and later expanded to just under 900, eventually earning $42 million in the U.S.

Come back next week for another installment of Marquee History!

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