Guardians of the Galaxy – Come and Get Your Love

| April 16, 2021 | 0 Comments

Video note: For some reason, I can’t embed this video. You have to click through and watch it on YouTube. Do it!

Is it possible to do a spoiler on something that happens in the first five minutes of a movie? If so, spoiler coming.

Guardians of the Galaxy is a romp of a movie, but it starts off very darkly. It begins with a young boy, maybe 10 years old, whose mother is on her death bed. He’s at her bedside. She gives him a gift, a box, but he refuses to take her hand. Instead, he runs out of the house and is suddenly beamed up, presumably to a spaceship hovering over his house. The mood is very sad and depressing.

The next scene (where the video above begins) takes place in a what appears to be the ruins of some stone structure. Maybe a castle. Foreboding music plays in the background. A robot like figure with red laser-eyes appears in a doorway. The eyes scan the scene and ghostly figures appear within the range of the eyes. The atmosphere is very scary and tense. The robot figure walks slowly forward, pushes a button on the side of his head and the face of Chris Pratt appears. He slowly places wired ear plugs in his ears and reaches to his belt and, with his gloved hand, pushes the play button on an old 1980’s vintage Sony Walkman. It will later be revealed that the gift his mother gave him was a cassette tape of 1970’s pop music.

The twangy opening cords of Come and Get Your Love starts playing and he begins to dance across the screen and the tension vanishes. The title Guardian of the Galaxy explodes on to the screen and the entire mood suddenly changes. Credits begin to pop up at random. And Pratt continues to bop, spin and strut through the ruins, theatrically kicking small alien creatures like footballs, using others as pretend stage microphones. The release from the darkness into the comedic light is almost physical. You want to jump out of your seat and dance with him. It’s a perfect overture to a really fun movie.

I’ve concluded that 70’s pop is a much better musical genre than I thought it was when I was experiencing it in the 70’s. It was my coming-of-age decade, so some might argue, it’s nostalgia. Yes, there was a lot of junk music in the 70’s, like any decade. But the songs we’re still listening to have, by definition, stood the test of time. And I have to say, I never really appreciated Come and Get Your Love until it was paired with Chris Pratt bebopping through an extraterrestrial ruin.

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