Old-Time Rock ‘n’ Roll:
How The 1980s Embraced 1950s and 1960s Oldies Music
A Dose of Oldies added to the Hayes-Addison Romance
Photo: "Moonlighting" by C. Strife is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
The detective-romance-dramedy series Moonlighting, a mixed cocktail of Remington Steele and Cheers, begins with former model Maddie Hayes, played by former model turned actress Cybill Shepherd, discovering she is destitute but for several tax write-offs including a Los Angeles detective agency. The City of Angels Investigations employs a cast of misfits, led by detective David Addison, played by Bruce Willis. Addison convinces Hayes to partner with him to save the agency, renaming it Blue Moon Detective Agency (Blue Moon is the fictional shampoo Maddie peddled). As with Cheers, audiences enjoyed the sexual tension between Hayes and Addison. People wanted to see if the male and female leads were going to get romantically involved. This creative show delighted audiences for the first few seasons, providing nostalgia for the smart old-time fast-talking, sexy characters of classic Hollywood movies, especially those of Howard Hawks. Due to the lengthy writing process, last minute changes causing production delays and forcing the cast and crew to spend long days on the set, feuds between Shepherd versus Willis and creator Glen Gordon Caron, and the egos of Willis and Shepherd towards the rest of the cast and crew, severely affected the show. As a result, Moonlighting ended in 1989.
Although Moonlighting was considered cutting-edge at the time, it had a reverence for pop-culture history, making references to music, Broadway musicals, and movies. Fun-loving, rhyming wisenheimer David Addison loves rock ‘n’ roll. In the show’s second episode, David sings Do Wah Diddy Diddy
while teaching Maddie to walk with a street-wise attitude. That scene is reminiscent of Bill Murray marching with fellow soldiers in the movie Stripes. In The Next Murder You Hear
episode, a drunk David Addison sings Aretha Franklin’s Respect
in a cocktail lounge filled will annoyed patrons. In The Murder’s in the Mail
episode, David sings My Girl
in a parking garage to distract a spy tailing him and Maddie. In My Fair David,
Addison is hosting a limbo party while he thinks Maddie is away, only to be caught in the act singing Chubby Checker’s Limbo Rock.
Maddie bets David that he can’t act maturely, and can’t break into song. David breaks this bet several times by doing the limbo again and breaking into a rendition of Money (That’s what I want).
Mrs. Di Pesto, the agency’s administrative assistant played by Allyce Beasley, is singing along with Brenda Lee’s version of Santa Claus is Coming to Town
when she walks into her apartment to find a Christmas miracle, a baby, during the Twas the Episode before Christmas
episode. Devil with the Blue Dress
plays throughout the Camille
episode featuring Whoopi Goldberg. In the Atomic Shakespeare
episode, in which the show parodies The Taming of the Shrew, David Addison does a cover of The Rascals’s Good Lovin’.
Rock ‘n’ roll nostalgia added to the fun.