When in Rome - "The Promise" 1987 Synthpop / New Wave / Sophisti-Pop / New Romantic
When in Rome's "The Promise," one of those terrific doses of dancy UK synthpop from the 1980s that employed a whole lot of super effective contrasts that made the whole thing feel like the musical equivalent of a firm mattress that'd been draped in satin sheets, always seemed like such a perfect tune to slot in with one of those classic coming-of-age flicks. And as such, it received that proper treatment in 2004 when it was included in Napoleon Dynamite, but here we have a certain YouTuber imagining what it could've been like had it been used in 1987's Some Kind of Wonderful as well, a film that'd been directed by Howard Deutch, who had also done Pretty in Pink the year prior, and was written and produced by the guy who'd been most synonymous with all of these coming-of-age 80s flicks in the first place, John Hughes. Seems to me that this idea could've worked, especially given the film's romantic subject matter, but its release date would've had to've been pushed back in order to make it all feasible, since the song was released a bunch of months after the movie.
Strangely enough, according to IMDB, Napoleon Dynamite was actually the first movie or TV show to use "The Promise" at all; which feels kind of insane, given what a total banger it'd been. You'd think a song like that would appear somewhere else sooner than 17 years after its initial release, but as it turns out, that wasn't the case. Everyone collectively dropped the ball on that, and so, I guess mega kudos go out to Napoleon Dynamite's music supervisor or whoever for ending that pretty hard-to-believe drought.
