Travolta's Dance Fever

Since this blog is called "Rambling from a Movie Addict", I'm gonna pose this movie question to you readers: does John Travolta have a clause in his contract that he has to dance in every movie he makes?

The reason I ask comes from my weekly Friday Night Movie Fest a few weeks back. I was at my friend's place when we decided to watch the classic Travolta flick The Boy in the Plastic Bubble as we had not seen it since it first aired in the mid-seventies. We remembered that this TV movie featured consummate TV actor Robert "Mike Brady" Reed as his father, Diane Hyland as his mother (and who was Travolta's real-life girlfriend) and Glynnis O'Connor who I had a crush on when I was a wee lad. And after viewing it, we also remembered how bad and dated the movie turned out to be ("Crap-tacular" was the consensus).

Anyways, while we were riffing on the movie a la Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (adding our own humourous commentary to the actions on the small screen), we came upon a scene where Travolta starts doing some dance moves (predating Saturday Night Fever). Watching him shake his booty, it got me thinking that the last few movies that I saw him in also featured him dancing.

Let's go down the list. Of course there's Saturday Night Fever, it's bad sequel Staying Alive, Grease and Urban Cowboy. Pulp Fiction and Be Cool features him dancing with Uma Thurman. Michael has him dancing with a few girls in a bar. Ladder 49 has him dancing at Joaquin Phoenix's wedding. Phenomenom has him dancing with his dog. Primary Colors had him dancing badly with Emma Thompson. I think he dances with Scarlet Johansson in A Love Song for Bobby Long. And I'm almost certain that he also does some type of rhythmic movement in Basic as well as those Look Who's Talking movies as well.

The only one I'm not completely sure about is Battlefield Earth because it was so gawd-awful that I have completely blocked it out of my mind.

So what do we learn from this? I guess that Travolta exhibiting dance moves is one of the many constants in the movie universe, ranking up there with a Christopher Walken offbeat monologues, Nicholas Cage going through some kind of drug-induced trip and Rob Schneider being a big screen waste of space.