1978 was the year when The Deer Hunter won the Academy Award for Best Picture running against Coming Home, Heaven Can Wait, Midnight Express and An Unmarried Woman. It was a case of four fairly serious dramas competing with one relatively light comedy in a year of hit genre movies like the slasher film Halloween, the comic book fantasy Superman and the Randal Kleiser musical Grease.

From a budget of $6 million the movie's producers, Allan Carr and Robert Stigwood, assembled a cast and crew around Carr's adaptation of Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey's play that was further re-written by Bronte Woodard. Scored with help from the pop music standouts, the Bee Gees, and set in the 1950s as an exuberant look at teen romance, Grease was a box office phenomenon and eventually earned some $96 million in domestic rentals. It also resulted in a best selling soundtrack album that helped to establish it in the hearts and minds of moviegoers everywhere who could relive their favorite movie moments with vinyl records long before the advent of cheap audiotapes let alone CDs.

Telling the story of Sandy Olsen (Olivia Newton-John), an Australian teenager visiting America, Grease's conflict builds from her summer romance with good-natured Danny Zuko (John Travolta). After falling for each other they find themselves separated by antagonistic roles in regular high school life with Sandy cast as the new girl and Danny holding court as leader of his gang, the T-Birds.

With a reputation to maintain he ignores her to uphold more polyamorous virtues but eventually longs for her company. Meanwhile Sandy makes friends with a complimentary female gang to the T-Birds called The Pink Ladies.

As the two star-crossed lovers try finding a way through the morass of teenage angst Danny gradually becomes a respectable varsity letterman, much to the chagrin of his T-Bird buddies. Likewise Sandy dons black clothing and pierced ears to support a harder edge more in keeping with The Pink Ladies aura. Their romance finally succeeds at an outdoor graduation carnival where Danny drives Sandy off into the sky as the movie's infectious soundtrack accompanies the closing credits organized yearbook style.

Designed as both a fanciful homage to the innocence of high school adolescence and as an insider, wink-wink, nudge-nudge satire of '50s musicals, Grease is a completely successful movie entertainment. With hit songs including "You're the One That I Want", "Hopelessly Devoted To You" and the title number, audiences then and now find themselves easily humming melodies, snapping their fingers and reciting lyrics as easily as they spout TV commercial jingles.

This mass appeal in the film clearly echoes the '70s nostalgia for the 1950s and for older forms of art and entertainment. Managing to attract audiences of adults with memories of the period inhabited by the T-Birds and The Pink Ladies the movie satisfied their more idealized, cotton candy memory of distant youth. Also managing to attract this adult audience's wave of movie-going children who were largely ignorant of jokes about Vice President Nixon or the importance of school dances as mixers with defined steps and rules of conduct, the movie delivered enough happy spectacle to pass the time.

Small details, charms and supporting performances abound throughout the movie's length and it's this depthless, buoyant and reassuring view of youth that prop up a silly story. From vintage cars and wisecracks in '50s vernacular to talented co-stars and cameo performers, the film's overall production value remains impressive even from through the distance of many years.

John Travolta is the movie's most noteworthy personality who remains a popular draw, however long in the tooth he might now be. With his late '70s superstardom eclipsed by the relative obscurity of his work in the '80s, he managed to recuperate himself with unheralded success in the '90s and on into today. Newton-John's music career began before, and continued after, Grease although her most memorable hits occurred in the early '80s before her diversification into various business ventures and her eventual triumph over breast cancer that has her cast as a new age entertainment icon.

Stockard Channing's Pink Lady-outsider, Betty Rizzo, cemented her type outside mainstream leading roles but subsequent years have seen her cast in a number of memorable parts on film, TV and on the stage. Jeff Conaway's T-Bird greaser Kenickie established him as a charismatic support and led to his memorable role on TV's Taxi despite the fact he was asked to stoop when on-screen with Travolta to avoid making the star seem short.

Among the lesser parts in the film are a number of now famous young actors and actresses who've each developed interesting careers, among them Didi Conn as Frenchy and Lorenzo Lamas and Michael Biehn in bit parts you'll miss if you blink. To attract an older audience and lend certain star power to the movie's ostensibly adult roles, Eve Arden was cast as Principal McGee, Frankie Avalon turns up as the Teen Angel and Sid Caesar gamely becomes Coach Calhoun with enough restraint to be merely weird.

Given the musical's long life on cable TV and its newest iteration on the great white way it's clear that, "Grease is the word", just as the ad copy told us in 1978. Every one of its joyful dancing and singing sequences, ridiculously overwrought plot points, odd characterization through cartoon stereotype and fantasy moments belong on the bottom half of any good Saturday afternoon double feature. For sheer number of smiles, claps and happy movie memories, Grease is a standout among few competitors but it also points to its specific moment when events off-screen determined the result we now know and love.

Henry Winkler was originally approached to play Danny but because he was then working as Fonzie on Happy Days he was reticent to accept the part. His fear of being typecast from defining America's sense of cool opened the door for former Welcome Back, Kotter sweat hog John Travolta to lobby for the role. Of course the timing was fortuitous in that he had recently set fire to the disco world with his star turn in producer Robert Stigwood's Saturday Night Fever though it was his ability to sing and dance that won him the part when Winkler backed away.

Had "the Fonz" played the part, though, I shudder to think about the results. Certainly it would have bee something more substantial than Winkler's earlier work on The Lords of Flatbush but it definitely would have looked something like an extended musical outtake from one of the more showy episodes of Happy Days. I doubt Carr and Stigwood's production machine would have broken down with Winkler as star but it is the accident of good working relationships and fortuitous timing to have seen Travolta cast in the starring role.

His Danny Zuko is absolutely brilliant with a rippling, muscle-and-bone thin body squeezed into jeans and a black leather jacket. His hair-do drips in his face and for once his dimpled chin works to make the cartoonish man both larger than life as he dances across the screen and somehow visibly innocent as he pines for Sandy from within the caste system of high school life.

Giving life to the choreography of Patricia Birch and waxing hyperbolic to the question, "did you get very far?" Grease leaves you yelling, "tell me more, tell me more." In the tradition of great entertainment it lasts just long enough to deliver the goods with broad characterizations and nostalgic settings that invite re-run after re-run after re-run.