3 Iconic Movie Songs That Every 70s Kid Remembers

There’s something about a song being used in a film that makes it especially memorable. Here are three songs from movies that likely come to mind, especially if you grew up in the 70s.

Videos by American Songwriter

“Stayin’ Alive” by The Bee Gees

As is true of many of the songs on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, “Stayin’ Alive” is just plain fun to jive out to. Apparently, when The Bee Gees wrote this one, they had the human heart in mind.

“We thought when we were writing it that we should emulate the human heart,” Robin Gibb explained to Daniel Rachel. “We got Blue Weaver who was the keyboard player at the time to lie on the floor and put electrodes on his heart and put it through the control room. Then we got the drummer to play the heartbeat. We were the first people in the world to do a drum loop based on that.”

“You’re The One That I Want” by John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John

This classic song from the Grease soundtrack never gets old. “You’re The One That I Want” was written by John Farrar. Apparently, the track was a last-minute write, as the songwriter got the call that the movie needed another track the night before.

“[Farrar] came into my trailer at, like, six in the morning, because he had been up all night,” Newton-John explained of the song. “He played it for me and said, ‘What do you think?’ I went, ‘Oh, God, it’s amazing.’ It just had this fantastic energy.”

“The Rainbow Connection” by The Muppets

“The Rainbow Connection” is famously heard when Kermit the Frog is sitting on a log with his banjo at the beginning of The Muppet Movie. Songwriter Paul Williams reflected on writing the special ballad with The Bluegrass Situation.

“The big thing with that song was that we had to show that Kermit has an inner life,” he explained. “The song that Kenny and I tried to shoot for was ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’. When Jiminy Cricket sings that song, it’s so touching. There’s so much depth there. We wanted to do something like that with Kermit. He’s a frog. He’s got water. He’s got refracted light. So he’s got rainbows. That seemed like the obvious thing for us to write about.”

Photo by: SUZANNE CORDEIRO/AFP via Getty Images