Beverly Hills Cop came out in 1984 and its iconic theme song, Axel F, is one of the great synth-pop compositions of all time. Few songs define an era more than Harold Faltermeyer’s classic. You hear it and right away, you think 1980’s. How amazing does a song have to be to put a guy named Harold on the map? I can’t even understand the confidence of Harold Faltermeyer. I guess when you know you have an arrow of this quality in your quiver, you don’t dumb your name down. Maybe it’s a German thing. No Harry or Hank for this dude. Harold. Bam. Take it or leave it. Amazing.
I went back to watch the original video and it’s prime 80s cheese whiz. Harold Faltermeyer, dressed like an undercover dick — fedora, gloves, shades n’ all obviously — breaks into an office with a huge sign that says RESTRICTED on the door so that he can watch clips of Beverly Hills Cop on a cathode ray tube monitor that’s half the size of an Alpha Romeo.
Some of the clips are just Eddie Murphy, which is always great. But is that enough for Harold Faltermeyer, P.I.? Helllllllllll no! Also on his vast monitor, and perhaps in it if I’m measuring the scale properly, we get a super weird, tiptoeing lady in David Bowie pants and a Jennifer Grey Flashdance top dancing alone by some ionic columns.
Harold studies her moves with intensity. She flits and prances and then Vogues with a chin sharp enough to cut Velveeta. The dance is fucking terrible, her outfit is ridiculous, her hair is indecipherable, the thing is shot from the wrong side of venetian blinds, and yet she’s as confident as a boxer in a fixed fight. If it’s not the most 80’s thing I’ve ever seen outside of Patrick Swayze’s Roadhouse mane and the Corey Wolfhart episode of Future Man, it’s damn close.
Her dance, or whatever the hell it was, seems to inspire Harold. The next shot after a quick insert of outstanding character actor Ronny Cox, (who’s 84 years old these days), is Harold on his feet smashing keys. From there we get a quick series of cuts where Harold is sometimes playing keyboard, sometimes typing as fast as he can as Beverly Hills Cop clips play on his monitor, and sometimes he recoils at night, in the dark of the office, when shit blows up in the movie.
This is concerning, because it suggests a true developmental delay on the part of Harold, if you subscribe to Piaget’s theory of object permanence. See, when shit blows up in a movie, you don’t have to flinch in your living room. When Dory swims around under the sea, you don’t have to hold your breath in your living room. But that’s a conversation for another time, and one of the greatest things about anything 80s is that none of it has to make any sense whatsoever.
What is important is that Harold’s break-in has transported him into the film itself, and at key points throughout the action he jogs in place behind Axel Foley using what appears to be WonkaVision from Willy Wonka’s 1971 film. Mission accomplished, Harold exits the restricted area, only to be hoisted by his own petard. He’s t-boned by a tractor trailer in the movie, and we have to assume that if you die in your movie, you die in real life. Like in Inception.
A fitting lesson to all the children watching: be careful what you wish for. One minute you’re yucking it the fuck up with Judge Reinhold and the next minute you’re roadkill. Now that I think of it, that’s a pretty succinct way to sum up the Gen X experience.
In conclusion, Hans Hugo Harold Faltermeyer is a goddamn legend. He just wrote and published his autobiography in 2022 entitled Where’s the Orchestra? My Story. I’m guessing it’s a bout a forgetful maestro who has no idea where to find his band? Or maybe it’s a he-said/she-said whodunit where the pivotal plot point is the location of musicians? I haven’t read it yet, and neither has anyone else judging by his goodreads page.
What brings us here today, though, is the sweet ass remix of Axel F by Omen Ahead. I don’t know who Omen Ahead is, but I’d mug an old lady in broad daylight to have hair like that again. Enjoy the remix! It’s pretty damn catchy.
