(10) limahl, “the neverending story”
dimmed
(11) Timbuk 3, “The Future’s So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)”
270-256
and will play in the elite 8

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/24/23.

Situation: Comedy: sebastian stockman on “the future’s so bright (i gotta wear shades”)

“Did you see ‘Wonder Years’ last night?”
Fifth grade. This passed for a pickup line.
“No,” said my crush. “… Why’d they kiss or something?”
“Uhhhhh …. ” I said, voice skipping up several octaves. “No, just wondering!”
I played it cool. But of course Kevin Arnold and Winnie Cooper had kissed. Fortunately, back there in the late 80s, my denial was plausible. There was no easy way to find out for sure; it would be summertime before that one played again.
But Kevin and Winnie had kissed, and it gave me, briefly, bravado enough to broach the subject with the girl who’d kissed me behind the piano in Mrs. Maclean’s class the year before.
It was the afternoon they found out Winnie’s brother died in Vietnam. Kevin (Fred Savage) walks out to “the big climbing tree in Harper’s Woods,” where he somehow knew he’d find Winnie (Danica McKellar). He sits next to her on the tree’s low-slung trunk, and wraps her in his New York Jets letter jacket. They embrace, then kiss chastely.
As the camera pulls back Daniel Stern, in voiceover as grown-up Kevin, tells us he thinks “about the events of that day again and again—and somehow I know Winnie does, too—whenever some blowhard starts talking about the anonymity of the suburbs, the mindlessness of the TV generation, because we know that inside each one of those identical boxes … were families bound together in the pain and struggle of love.”
Unadulterated Baby Boomer Apologetics, and I drank it straight. Growing up in rural Lafayette County, Missouri, on a gravel road about five miles out of Alma, our farming community of 400, I didn’t know from identical boxes or anonymous suburbs. What I did know about the world outside I learned from half-hour comedies, in reruns and primetime.
I learned that a hickey was a scandal and that by looking into someone’s eyes you could discern whether or not they’d gotten lucky the night before. I learned about diet pills and that the worst thing you can say to a significant other is “I told you so.” There was, apparently, a world where people talked about their problems and their feelings instead of simmering with barely-suppressed passive-aggressive rage.
We didn’t have Nick at Nite. We turned on Channel 62 or 41 until it was time for the new network shows at 7. My kids binge, I vegged: “Growing Pains,” “Family Ties,” “Kate and Allie,” “Dear John,” “Andy Griffith,” “Dick Van Dyke,” “The Cosby Show,” “Mary Tyler Moore,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Who’s The Boss,” “Cheers.” Everything ran together into my head where, with my warped critical faculties, I pieced together an idea of how the world worked, inferring social norms via their violation on sitcoms: Plato’s Cave with a laugh track.

Fillmore High

“Head of the Class” was a classroom sitcom in the “Welcome Back, Kotter” mode—a charismatic teacher enters the lives of an at-first unresponsive but quickly loyal group of students. The late-80s twist was that, instead of “Kotter”’s Gabe Kaplan confronting his delinquent Sweathogs, “Head of the Class”’s Howard Hessemann shows up as the substitute history teacher for a bunch of MENSA members in the Individualized Honors Program at Manhattan’s fictional Millard Fillmore High. Could the former Dr. Johnny Fever teach these geeks there was more to life than books? You had to tune in—on, I wanna say, Wednesdays 8:30/7:30 Central—to find out.
The IHP had one of each kind of nerd—the poet, the math geek, the computer guy, the first-generation immigrant, the speech-and-debate specialist, the conservative, the 11-year-old cello-playing super genius, the leather-vested bad boy who didn’t want to be there, and so on.
The gang is alternately coddled and berated by Dr. Samuels, Fillmore High’s principal, who usually wants them left alone to prepare for their next academic bowl against Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, or—in a very special 1988 two-parter actually filmed in Moscow—a team of Russian high school students (first line of The New York Times review (!) of the episode(!?): “The new Soviet openness creeps into prime-time entertainment… “)
I loved the show for what I took to be its knowing banter (I was eight) and even more for its acceptance and acknowledgment of a world outside the frame. I first encountered the Broadway musical on “Head of the Class” via the school’s productions of “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Hair.” From “Head of the Class” I learned, sorta, about the Cuban Missile Crisis. More on that later.
And “Head of the Class” is how I, outside of town in a farmhouse where cable couldn’t go, encountered Timbuk 3’s “The Future’s So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades),” for all I knew at first, the IHP gang had written it. Was there anything they couldn’t do?

The Song

Is “The Future’s So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)” a wry satire of the late-80s’ rampant greed-is-good attitude, with the song’s clueless speaker in gormless pursuit of that “50 thou a year” which “will buy a lot of beer” regardless of the consequences for the planet or its future?
Or, as presented in the lip-synched music video by this history class at the end of history, is it a full-throated rallying cry for the ascendant technocracy? (Cue Michael Buffer: “Let’s get rrrrrready to do neoliberrrrralism!”)
Depends who you ask.
The band’s members insist it’s the former, and have been doing so since the song came out.
“A lot of people thought it was some kind of real optimistic song about how Reaganomics is going to save us all,” songwriter and lead singer Pat MacDonald told The Orlando Sentinel in 1987, under the headline “TIMBUK 3’S ANTI-NUKE ‘SHADES’ TURNS INTO MISUNDERSTOOD HIT.”
MacDonald met Barbara Kooyman in the late-70s in Madison, Wisconsin, where they played in separate bands. It wasn’t until after they married and moved to Austin that they formed Timbuk 3. “The Future’s So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)” was the first single off their debut album “Greetings from Timbuk 3.”
“I was surprised,” MacDonald told the Sentinel. “But then I should’ve known it would happen that way because I know people listen to lyrics real peripherally.”
The reporter, Gary Graff, at first seems to accept MacDonald’s framing. He calls the song’s title chorus line a “deadpanned anti-nuclear witticism.” But “Shades” has no lyric as clear as “born down in a dead-man’s town,” or anything close, really. And Graff admits that “it’s easy for a casual listener to be misled—or at the very least, confused—by MacDonald’s intent. You can only get the satire … if you fixate on his delivery.”
Even then, “satire” seems a stretch. And MacDonald’s best defense is to point to lyrics that aren’t in the song as recorded: “Well I’m well aware/of the world out there/Getting blown to bits/But what do I care?”
MacDonald “thought they were were too heavy-handed. The idea is already expressed in the song without having to spell it out like that.” [Ed. note: False] “So it wouldn’t have been as good a song.” [Ed. note: Probably?] “And it definitely wouldn’t have been played on the radio.” [Ed. Note: True].
Nor would it have made a perfect backdrop to the IHP kids’ video. In it, the author is dead and whatever wisps of ironic distance the singer might be trying to stake out from its career-oriented speaker are obliterated by this network television interpretation.
You can find the video on Youtube. The version I’m watching was posted by an account called “cringevision,” and it is certainly chockablock with a chonky 80s’ corniness.
The class is presenting the video to Dr. Samuels, who seems skeptical—they’ve spent too much time on this contribution to the Fillmore High 80s time capsule—this seems like just another of Mr. Moore’s distractions. (In a joke slipped in by some writer’s-room subversive, just before pushing play Dennis assures Dr. Samuels “You’re going to love it.” Dr. Samuels: “That’s what they said about Pink Flamingoes.” There’s a dissertation to be done on the distance between John Waters and ABC’s 1987 sitcom slate, but … not here.)
The audience watches the enthusiastic class watch the skeptical Samuels watch the video. It begins with Mr. Moore walking into the classroom, opening something that looks like a glowing laptop, then recoiling as a 3D image of Samuels pops up, the top of his head opens and the members of the class fly out.
The harmonica riff kicks into high gear as Mr. Moore mugs a “what the hell?” face for the camera, bites his lip and peers back in. Eric, the bad boy, is dressed in different outfits, performing as all the members of the band—harmonica/lead lip-syncher, drummer, keyboardist, guitar, and bass.
After the 20-second musical intro and establishing shots, we see Dennis Blunden—computer whiz, slob, and target of so dozens of fat jokes—crack his knuckles and taps at the keys on his computer. This generates floating televisions that feature shoulders-up shots of one of the eight other IHP kids, wearing sunglasses and “grooving” to the music against backdrops of static.
There is no real narrative to this thing, and it would be tedious to try to describe all of its scenes (I tried). Jawarhalal and Janice work in a chemistry lab; Alan is sworn in as president by Sarah; Arvid slides down the rings of Saturn. The point of the video is to illustrate the text—not the subtext—of the song.
And, as a statement of what it was like to be in a gifted and talented program in the late 80s, it’s almost perfect—a celebration of pure potential, an assertion of absolute faith in a system that will duly reward its most talented.

“I study nuclear science.”

Almost every day growing up, I rode on a patch of rural-Missouri blacktop called "NN," past a square of chain-link fence in the middle of a cornfield, not three miles from where I watched all that TV. Inside the fence was gravel, a number of poles and antennae-type structures jutted up out of the ground. Hanging from the fence and facing the road was a square blue sign with "A-8" in white lettering. For a long time, I assumed it was some sort of water-pumping station. I was 9 or 10, which means it was 1987 or ’88, by the time it occurred to me to actually ask what "A-8" might be.
“That's a nuclear missile,” Dad said. Specifically, a Minuteman II, one of thousands sprinkled across the rural U.S.
Helpfully, Dad went on to explain that if, “God forbid,” I should ever see it go off, it wouldn't head east over St. Louis —> Indianapolis —> Philadelphia to Russia, but north, over the Pole, to shorten its distance to Moscow. I don't know for sure that this was true, nor do I know why, true or not, he thought this might be a helpful piece of information. Add to this the headquartering of the Stealth Bomber at nearby Whiteman Air Force Base, the Steve Gutenberg/John Lithgow/Jason Robards movie “The Day After" in which a warhead airbursts over Kansas City (a mere 60 miles away), plus the CIA spy Aldrich Ames and you have the receipt for dozens of late-night anxiety attacks in my pre-adolescence.
In a fumbling attempt to comfort me, the old man offered that if there was a nuclear exchange, we'd “never know it,” because so many of our missiles were pointed at their missiles and vice versa.
This didn't help.
Those missiles never did go off—they were decommissioned and hauled away in the early years of this century. But this is all to say that the phrase “nuclear science” hit different in 1987. We weren’t even a decade removed from Three-Mile Island, and it had been less than a year since Chernobyl.
So, score one for MacDonald: that first line is ominous.
But it’s just one phrase and the party starts now.

“I love my classes.”

MacDonald says his school-loving protagonist is a willing future cog in a machine bent on self-devouring itself. But MacDonald relies here on a rock trope that was getting less sturdy by the year: giving the finger to the establishment.
The song’s hero is not smoking in the boys room, nor is he hot for teacher. He loves his classes. He needn’t fight for his right to party, because he’s “got a job waitin’/for my graduation” and “fifty thou a year will buy a lot of beer.” (NB: 50,000 1986 dollars is $136, 482.66 today, so we’re still pretty good on the beer front).
Read in earnest, as they mostly were, these lyrics don’t just give us a celebration of Reaganomics. We also get a fitting soundtrack for Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?”
In the summer of 1989—before the Berlin Wall fell but after the IHP gang made its trip to Moscow—Fukuyama, then a deputy director at the State Department, achieved the essayist’s dream: he published an argument whose thesis was so bad he would dine out on it for 35 years. Much-cited, much-derided, and incessantly-revisited, “The End of History?” declared “an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.”
Fukuyama didn’t argue that events would stop happening, but that the Hegelian dialectic had completed its work and brought us to “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
In other words we (capitalism, the U.S., democracy) had won. The only thing to do now—as individuals in this society of victors—was lean hard into the realm of individual achievement.

“I’ve got a crazy teacher. He wears dark glasses.”

In the first episode, Mr. Moore, an out-of-work actor and long-term substitute encounters this group of sullen smarties uninterested in engaging him. He quizzes them on the Cuban Missile Crisis. They know the signal dates and events (at least from the American perspective). But Mr. Moore says they’ve omitted “the single most important factor … a little item called a baseball.” He tosses it in the air and catches it.
Hessemann/Fever/Moore gives the apocryphal account of Castro’s having tried out for the New York Giants, who decided he was “just not big league material … But if Fidel Castro had had the strength to throw a baseball past Duke Snider or Mickey Mantle there might not have been a missile crisis and today Castro’d be on TV doing beer commercials.”
“That is really dumb,” says Alan, the conservative. “That’s like saying if Ronald Reagan had been a better actor, we’d have a left-wing Supreme Court.”
There’s a beat, a bell, and that’s a sitcom.
The historiography here is … shaky at best. But Moore’s point—which he’ll make roughly once an episode—is that, more than facts and figures, dates and names, history is sliding doors and contingencies. Individual relationships matter (Mr. Moore is a former hippie and current liberal, but he is not a Marxist), and sometimes, nerds, you should get your noses out of your books and into the real world.
“Touch grass,” he might say today.
Dr. Johnny Fever, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

“I’m doing all right, gettin’ good grades.”

When this episode and its video first aired, Mark Zuckerberg was not quite three years old. Bill Gates had appeared on the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans for the first time just a few months before.
In 1987’s burgeoning meritocracy on the cusp of a credentialism explosion, getting good grades is a prerequisite for “doing all right.” The line reads less like irony and—against the backdrop of the video—more like the final full acceptance, and even endorsement, of the only remaining path for upward mobility in this country. By the late 90s, it would be a commonplace that the jocks could have high school; the nerds would make out better in the long run.
The IHP kids are at some sort of midpoint on a smaller-scale Hegelian dialectic of Jocks vs. Nerds. Long having dispensed with the gentleman’s C and the idea of legacy admissions (not the practice, mind you, but the acknowledgment of it), “Head of the Class” has moved us on the continuum from nerds as gross outcasts or grinds—as seen in, say, “Weird Science” or “Revenge of the Nerds”—to this midway point where they’re featured on television and starring in “cool” music videos. In 1987, it’s still a ways off, but we’re on the irrevocable road toward the world-bestriding colossi of Jobs and Bezos and Gates and Zuck.
The nerds could have declared victory over the jocks—declared their own end of history—at pretty much any point over the last 15 or 20 years. But why don’t we go ahead and call it officially. Let’s plant the flag on a fleeting moment during Super Bowl LVII. As the broadcast returns from commercial sometime in the second half, Fox cameras find Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk sitting next to each other in a box. Needlessly glossing the shot, announcer Kevin Burkhardt observes, “Some brilliant minds in that photo.”
OK, so it wasn’t, strictly speaking, a photograph. But in that offhand and inaccurate aside, Burkhardt—spokesman for the jocks!—neatly synthesizes the culture’s current and long-time attitude toward nerds, wealth, and power. That 90s assumption about nerds making out better in the long run has become nerds=money and, because money=power, power must … equal nerds?
The idea that anyone who has money is smart—they’re doing something right!—is so ingrained that we find it hard to imagine things otherwise.

“I’m heavenly blessed, and worldly-wise. I’m a peeping-tom techie with x-ray eyes.”

Which is our current hellscape.
Zuckerberg, in diapers when this video dropped, got his start with a “hot or not?” website where he invited people to rate their female classmates and has parlayed that into a business whose model is to collect petabytes of data on your online social interactions. Surveillance capitalism: there are many examples, but this one is mine.
And yes, Pat MacDonald, I know: “peeping-tom” signals the speaker’s position as probable creep and the “x-ray eyes” are probably the result of radiation exposure. But it comes too late in the song, and the chorus is too insistent.
To hear “the future’s so bright /(I gotta wear shades)” as either the ironic boast of a speaker who has no clue or as the rueful declaration of a speaker who does have a clue but doesn’t care, you have to read very closely—and it would help to know the songwriter personaly.

Timbuk 3 laughs last

In compromising for radio play, MacDonald removed the explicit condemnation from his lyrics. He expected the culture to share his assumptions, about careerism, about nukes. It did not.
But, more than 35 years on, and seen in the context of its cultural uptake, “The Future’s So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)” is a ruined monument to late-80s hubris. Ozymandias in board shorts.
We assumed, like Fukuyama, that things were only looking up from there. And now we have these two trunkless legs of stone—“The End of History” and the “Head of the Class” video—to remind us in retrospect that in addition to that still-unsecured total victory of liberal democracy the bright futures on that night in 1987 included catastrophes on the personal, professional and societal scales: from the violent dissolution of Robin Givens’ marriage to Mike Tyson, to Dan Schneider’s (he was Dennis) downfall as the Harvey Weinstein of Nickelodeon, to the tech world’s remorseless drive for automatization, higher profits and constant growth, exacerbated by a general failure by anyone involved to have taken a single goddamn humanities class.
And the future is still bright for all of us, in just the way MacDonald intended. We all could still use some shades, whether they’re for the mushroom cloud, the glare reflecting off a sun-scorched earth, or the light at the end of the tunnel.

Sebastian Stockman is a Teaching Professor in English at Northeastern University. Among other places, his essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His work has been noted in Best American Essays and Best American Sportswriting. He lives in Cambridge, Mass., and writes an (occasional, free) newsletter at https://sebastianstockman.substack.com/

FANTASIA ON THE DANCE FLOOR: LIMAHL AND MIRACLES OF “THE NEVERENDING STORY” BY ERIN KEANE

If you heard the song before you saw the movie, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in for a simple good time. “Turn around,” Limahl croons to the buoyant beat, drawing out the final vowel of the opening line into a gleeful run. “Look at what you see.” Giorgio Moroder, our Father of Disco, was onto something when he composed his “Never Ending Story” fantasy anthem’s shimmering flourishes, its soaring peaks and valleys carrying Keith Forsey’s lyrics like a flight on a Luck Dragon’s back. We needed this confection, a dose of misdirection from the anguish we will first endure.
Do you feel a twirl coming on? I do. I want to rush a dance floor in a storm of balloons, dedicate this one to my lost friends. When I dance, I always close my eyes. I can bring them all back that way.
“It’s still a song I play as a DJ and people still love it, especially the girls,” Moroder, that mad genius of timeless soundtracks, said in a 2018 interview. “The ladies, let’s say 40 years old or so, they all heard the song when they were children. It stays in their head. They love it.”
When Beth Anderson layers in on, “Make believe I’m everywhere, I’m hidden in the lines,” it sure sounds romantic. That’s how Stranger Things season 3 sells it anyway, when, to coax a crucial piece of information out of his genius long-distance girlfriend Suzie, unlikely hero Dustin engages in this duet over a radio with all his skeptical friends listening in.
What do the girls—the ladies, let’s say 40 years old or so—really love about this song? The movie set off a chain reaction for me: The NeverEnding Story raced a snail so Labyrinth could dance so The Princess Bride could joke so Shrek could ruin “Hallelujah” so Stranger Things could weaponize our fantasies into horror. Unlike later tracks Stranger Things pulled out of the crates of my youth, “Never Ending Story” is not an alienation anthem, as its big TV moment shared by two dorks in puppy love underscores. It presupposes connection, tapping into a feeling less retro and more like ancient, despite its disco-meets-New Wave sound. Like all of Giorgio Moroder’s big soundtrack hits—consider Blondie’s “Call Me,” Irene Cara’s “Flashdance … What a Feeling,” Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away”—the song and the movie are impossible for me to separate. And so, no matter what age I am when I hear this song playing, it takes me back to a time before cool, when we were Childlike Empresses waiting open-hearted for our new names, or Atreyus on a quest to find Bastian, the one who could bestow them.
The singer, Limahl—he of the gravity-defying hair, the baby-soft features, the gentle seeking eyes, a perfectly safe gay crush for the ladies, let’s say 40 years old or so, to have tended in their girlhoods thanks to Wolfgang Petersen’s video—is a one-hit wonder only in the strictest sense of the term. Born Christopher Hamill before he gave himself a faux-exotic stage name, an anagram of his last name, Limahl was also the front man of the English band Kajagoogoo, whose lead single “Too Shy” off their debut album White Feathers rose to Number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100.
And then the band fired him. Over the phone. “I was absolutely betrayed,” he said in a 2019 interview. To be flying so high one minute, only to be left behind. It is a story any girl who has navigated the dumpster treachery of school feels hard.
And about a year later, Giorgio Moroder’s people called. When “Never Ending Story” broke through on the charts, it put Limahl in rare company. He became not a two-hit wonder, but rather a one-hit wonder twice over. I’ve by no means exhausted the research on this matter but it seems terribly difficult to do what Limahl did, to achieve one-hit wonder status as both a member of a group and as a solo artist. You could say CeeLo Green. You could get deep in the weeds on Dave Stewart if you pretended the Eurythmics didn’t exist. Safe to say it’s uncommon. You have to respect it.
Not that Limahl had a lock on the job. “Never Ending Story” is a bit higher than Limahl’s vocal sweet spot, and as he tells it, he partied the night before his audition and arrived hungover to Berlin where he kinda blew it at first. That’s the thing about second chances: We’re not always great at recognizing the door when it opens. Moroder, who knew what he wanted from a movie soundtrack theme, was patient, teased it out of him, and on the second try, Limahl nailed it. Two hits—one under Kajagoogoo, and one under his chosen name—should disqualify Limahl from a conversation about one-hit wonders, but if anyone knows the power something as simple as a name change can bring about, it’s The NeverEnding Story fans.
It's become common to look back on ‘80s movies for kids and wonder at the earnest, unfiltered emotional brutality of them, but it’s hard to say what an acceptable alternative would have been. We watched the things we couldn’t talk about and spoke in a shorthand collage that nodded to those indelible scenes. Parents for the most part were not our best friends. Who even had a therapist? The world felt strange and unknowable and adults acted like we couldn’t hear them talking. That scream of Bastian’s, the one that crossed dimensions? I heard it, too.
Step off the dance floor with me. Turn around. Look at what you see: An attic, jumbled with maps and skeletons and taxidermies, a secret hiding place at school where this average sad boy could hide from the world with a book that he swiped off a grumpy antiquarian who knew what he was doing. (If you don’t think you would have taken refuge in such an attic and let yourself be swept away into an epic tale by candlelight, I don’t think we can be friends.) Before this book, the average boy woke up next to the one he fell asleep reading. His dad is all business. This boy, Bastian, tells dad that he dreamed about his mother. Business dad doesn’t want to hear it. “We can't let Mom's death be an excuse for not getting the old job done, right?”
At eight, nine, ten years old I didn’t understand that dead parents are just a trope in children’s stories because otherwise there’s too much supervision, too much security, too much love. When my father died, I took those stories personally. Bastian and me, we were going through it. I understood all too well why he couldn’t bring his head out of the clouds. We knew there was no such thing as a story that never ends. It was midnight in the Howling Forest all day long, and we were supposed to give it our all, what, in gym class? I needed any refuge from the Nothing I could find.  
Turn the radio off for a minute. Sit down and watch with me. See the Nothing as it rolls in. It obliterates everything. Creatures large and small are on the run and their only hope is a champion named Atreyu, who will fight to save the Childlike Empress, the being whose energy powers Fantasia and who is losing that energy to the Nothing.
Turn around. Look at what you see: Atreyu is just a little boy on horseback, armed with a bow, his courage and an amulet designed to protect him. Atreyu is being asked to do something impossible, but kids are always being asked to do things that seem impossible at first.
We can't let the encroaching Nothing be an excuse for not getting the old job done, right?
How does the song go again? “Rhymes that keep their secrets / Will unfold behind the clouds,” Limahl and Anderson sing in ethereal harmony. Pull up a blanket. Find the matches, light the candles. Ration this sandwich as a hedge against the hunger. You probably know what time it is.
We have to talk about Artax, Atreyu’s horse and best friend, drowning in the Swamp of Sadness.
“Everyone knew that whoever let the sadness overtake him would sink into the swamp.” The warning didn’t make it any easier to watch.
Turn around, Atreyu: Look at what you see. Artax is stuck, his own weight pulling him down. Atreyu tries to pull him out, but the muck is too strong, and Artax doesn’t have the strength.
“Artax, you’re sinking! Turn around!” Atreyu screams.
“You have to try. You have to care,” he pleads. He’s just a boy, sent on an impossible quest. This is our champion? Or, of course he is. He just doesn’t know what his real mission is yet.
Atreyu looks into the camera, tears running down his face. Cut to Bastian in the school attic who looks up from the book, tears streaming down his face. Cut to me as a child, watching for the first time, utterly unprepared to witness this. Atreyu, our hero, could fail? And Artax could sink while Atreyu walks out on his own feet? What was Artax carrying that Atreyu couldn’t see?
Cut to me now, watching again as an adult. We can’t let Artax’s death be an excuse for not getting the old job done, right? Tell me what we couldn’t see unfolding behind the clouds. Even Bastian and I, who thought we already knew what there was to know about how stories end, were devastated by the unfairness. Atreyu was wrong when he thought Artax was dying because he didn’t care enough. I hear Morloch the Mountain’s resigned sigh—“we do not care … whether or not we care”—not as apathy now but as the raw material that builds a defensive shell. But Morloch the Mountain is also stuck, that shell too heavy to ever lift into the air.
I will let Giorgio Moroder and Limahl in on a secret: If it weren’t for their song, then that moment—Artax in the swamp, Atreyu trying and failing to save him—would be the only thing, pretty much, I would remember about this movie. The story would begin in the swamp and end with Morloch, with Atreyu defeated, feeling it was all for nothing. It’s the song that helps me remember what happens next:
Atreyu turns around. He trudges back through the waters that claimed Artax with a wolf on his heels, and who should swoop down to save him from the swamp or the black dog or whatever we’re calling despair today but Falkor, the Luck Dragon. Look at what you see: Falkor is a miracle incarnate, made of all good things, both wise and innocent, fearless and tender, nurturing and fierce. If this song had a texture I could run my fingers across, Falkor’s incandescent feathery fur would be it. I can forget this as easily as I can forget how the film ends,  with Bastian soaring through Fantasia on Falkor’s back: In the beginning, it is always dark. That’s when we’re free to build.
Bastian shouts Moon Child’s name and becomes a champion; his scream across dimensions brings Artax and Atreyu back to life. Moroder gives Limahl a second chance at his audition, and he’s back on Solid Gold.
Years later, Limahl’s second chance had its own comeback thanks to Dustin and Suzie’s duet on Stranger Things. Charts look different now, and so does a hit: A surge in streams of “The NeverEnding Story” put it almost to the top of Spotify’s U.S. Viral 50 chart, and YouTube demand for the video increased by 800 percent.
It is tempting to point to this resurrection as proof of the song’s timelessness, of it having earned its neverending status. But what if I told you it didn’t need a second life to prove its worth? Without Falkor, the swamp wins. Without the song to remind me of Falkor, all I can remember is Atreyu’s anguished witness, not Bastian’s eventual triumph. Look again at the name we gave the phenomenon of the singular hit. Consider what an honor it is to bear it. Wonder is another way of saying miracle, which is to say—for three minutes and thirty glorious seconds, before you beg the DJ to play it again—a mirror of your dreams.

Erin Keane is the author of RUNAWAY: Notes on the Myths That Made Me (Belt Publishing), one of NPR's Best Books of 2022, as well as three collections of poems. She is Chief Content Officer at Salon and teaches creative nonfiction, poetry, and professional writing in the Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University.