Kevin Bacon Enrolled in High School to Research Footloose

Before Step Up, there was Footloose. Kevin Bacon played a high school kid who brought dance back to a small town. Bacon was already 24 at the time and worried he couldn’t still play a modern day (1984) teenager. So he had the producers enroll him in a high school.

“Nobody recognized me,” Bacon said in an interview on the Footloose 4K UHD and Blu-ray. “I went into the bathroom and There were some big corn fed kids that were ready to shove me around a little bit. In fact, there was actually a kid very much like Chris Penn’s character who took me under his wing and was kind of protective.”

To hear Bacon describe it, it was like having to have the first day of school all over again.

“It was in a lot of ways really frightening to be thrown into a completely new culture and new group of people,” Bacon said. “It was literally terrifying.”

Bacon said he initially planned to play Ren’s arrival at school cocky, but his real-life school experience snapped him out of that.

“My instinct for that walk was I’ll just get up there and it’s like Travolta walking down the street in Saturday Night Fever,” Bacon said. “That’s not what I felt at all. I was like keep your head down because somebody’s going to take a swing at you. That’s the way I played it because that’s what I felt.”

The new 4K UHD of Footloose shows off sunny small-town America, but you still see the film grain. Nights in the open air look great. Other shots that emphasize the deep shadows include John Lithgow sitting at his typewriter, the angry dance in the empty factory and any scene where they’re driving at night.

With a surround sound setup, you’ll get a little bit of Kenny Logging backup in the rear and some handclaps but those are the only enhancements to the original stereo mix.