The big movie of 1978 was Grease, a musical, an adaptation based on the 1971 stage musical of the same name by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey.  Grease, the play, was on Broadway from 1972-1980.  This 1978 film depicted the lives of greaser Danny Zuko (John Travolta) and Australian transfer student Sandy Olsson (Olivia Newton-John), who developed an attraction for each other during a summer romance.  The story line was in the summer of 1958, local boy Danny Zuko and vacationing Australian Sandy Olsson meet at the beach and fell in love.  When the summer ended, Sandy worried that they may never meet again, but Danny told her that their love was only the beginning.  They were both seniors at Rydell High School, which in the original play was based on Taft High School in Chicago.  Danny was caught between his feelings and his bad-boy reputation, so that he snubbed Sandy in front of his gang and she became upset.  The on and off love story continued with the boy’s gang of the T-Birds and the girl’s gang of the Pink Ladies.  The next day, Danny apologized to Sandy for having brushed her off the previous night and successfully won her back.  However, their friends crashed their date. After a disastrous beauty class leaves Frenchy with candy-pink hair, she drops out of beauty school and reluctantly returns to Rydell to complete her high-school education.  There were typical teenage problems throughout this movie.  Since I graduated high school in 1957 and this was based on a Chicago high school of 1958 kids, I really understood some of the plots that were exaggerated.  However, the music is what made this movie so successful.  We took Joy to see this movie and she was dancing in her seat as the show began.  Director Randal Kleiser took numerous liberties with the original source material, most notably moving the setting from an urban Chicago setting to a more suburban locale, reflecting his own teenage years at Radnor High School in the suburbs of Philadelphia.  Elvis Presley was considered for the role of The Teen Angel but died before production, so that Frankie Avalon was chosen.  Frankie Valli sang the theme song “Grease.”  Sid Caesar was cast as the coach since he had been popular in the 1950s, as had Eve Arden, Frankie Avalon, Joan Blondell, Ed Byrnes, Alice Ghostley, and Dody Goodman.  The only problem about Oliva Newton John was whether she could act.  The opening beach scene was shot in Malibu.  The exterior Rydell scenes, were shot at Venice High School in Venice, California.  The drive-in movie scenes were shot at the Burbank Pickwick Drive-In, so that most of the scenes were in Los Angeles to cut down on expenses.  In its opening weekend, the film grossed almost nine million dollars.  After 66 days, it had grossed $100 million to become Paramount’s second-highest-grossing film, behind The Godfather, and ended its initial run with a gross of $132,472,560, the highest-grossing film in 1978.  It became the highest-grossing musical ever at the time, eclipsing the 13-year-old record held by The Sound of Music, with a worldwide gross of $341 million.  The film was successful both critically and commercially, becoming the highest-grossing musical film at the time.  Its soundtrack album ended 1978 as the second-best-selling album of the year in the United States, only behind the soundtrack of the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, which also starred Travolta.  The song “Hopelessly Devoted to You” was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 51st Academy Awards.  The film also received five nominations at the 36th Golden Globe Awards.  In 2020, Grease was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.  A sequel, Grease 2, was released in 1982, starring Maxwell Caulfield and Michelle Pfeiffer as a newer class of greasers, but was not as successful.  Do you remember Grease?