Nathan Rabin's Happy Cast

Greetings lovely listeners! This one’s a bit late on account of Clint’s whirlwind sojourn to Sundance, but now he’s back and we can subject you to another shockingly one-sided cinematic duel between John Travolta and Nicolas Cage! This time around, we decided to go without a guest, since a) we got busy and b) we didn’t want to subject the hard-to-find Nic Cage sporting drama The Boy in Blue on a third person. That’s right, in 1986, Nic Cage starred in a Canadian historical rowing flick as the Canuckier-than-thou bad boy sculler Nick Hanlan in The Boy in Blue, an absolute slog of a sports movie where Cage barely pretends to be Canadian, let alone act. Luckily, we got to leaven that with a Travolta movie about an equally confounding sport (mechanical bull riding) in James Bridges’ surprisingly textured Urban Cowboy. Think of it as Saturday Night Hoedown — another big Travolta vehicle that peers into an under-explored subculture for the time and ends up popularizing it. Where Fever brought disco back from the de