CAPTAIN VIDEO!: Olivia Newton-John, "Toughen Up"

Greetings, Videots!

After years of being buffeted about at random throughout the 1980th Dimension, our faithful crew has lately found itself in a period of relative calm. For the first time in a long time, we've been able to settle in and really focus on the videos from a specific period — which is to say that just a few weeks after bringing you unfortunate evidence of what Marie Osmond was up to in the summer of 1985, we're back to present an even more baffling artifact that was originally released mere months later.

We are talking, friends, about the video for Olivia Newton-John's "Toughen Up."

Before we really start getting into this clip, it truly bears pointing out that Ms. Newton-John's discography boasts a truly impressive run of hits. Today, people tend to mostly associate her with Grease and "Physical," but between 1971 and 1985, she was on the radio more or less constantly, racking up 26 Top 40 singles in the U.S. alone. And the Top 40 doesn't come close to telling the whole story — in addition to her numerous hits in other territories, including her native Australia, she was also popular on country and adult contemporary stations; as if all that wasn't enough, there's also the matter of her film career, which includes the aforementioned smash musical about the 35-year-old kids at fictional Rydell High.

That's an awful lot for one paragraph, but it's hard to talk about Olivia Newton-John's career without lapsing into breathless superlatives. Even if you don't have an in-depth familiarity with her work — and CAPTAIN VIDEO! admittedly can't claim to have heard more than a handful of those hits — just looking at the numbers is enough to make a person do a double take. For a really long time, she was a really big deal.

Initially, it appeared as though the '80s would be kind to Olivia. Her appearance in Grease — specifically, her character's climactic metamorphosis from virginal goody-goody to leather-clad sex goddess — made for an easy offramp away from the AC ballads she'd hitherto been known for. The cover art for her tenth album, 1977's Making a Good Thing Better, depicts her smiling with a flower in her hair; when she returned the following year with Totally Hot, she was clad in head-to-toe black leather, looking serious as a heart attack.

That change set the stage for some of the biggest hits of her career, partly because it went deeper than Newton-John's image. She also started shifting away from dewy-eyed ballads while embracing modern production; after Totally Hot, she cut a pair of duets with Andy Gibb before taking on the Xanadu soundtrack, which found her surrounded by synths. This led to the Physical album, which... well, CAPTAIN VIDEO! assumes you remember what happened there.

The years following Physical seemed to find Olivia Newton-John experiencing a certain sort of Alexander the Great-esque ennui. With no more worlds to conquer, she released a greatest hits album (which itself spawned hit singles), reunited with her Grease partner John Travolta for a movie no one loved, and spent a long time tinkering with her 13th solo LP, 1985's Soul Kiss. Although it wouldn't be fair to say she actually took four years off between Physical and Soul Kiss, it would be ignoring reality to pretend there isn't any difference between a new studio album and assorted product.

It would also be ignoring reality to pretend Newton-John's place in the marketplace hadn't changed significantly. For all the attention that was paid to her shift into more "adult" material, her sexuality was still expressed under a thick veneer of plausible deniability; she wasn't really coming out and actually saying anything all that naughty. Between Physical and Soul Kiss, the pop marketplace welcomed a number of far more explicit female performers, with Madonna leading the charge, all of whom left ONJ's whole vibe feeling rather quaint — and when buyers got a load of the glow-up she'd been given for the Soul Kiss album cover, it also felt confused and a little desperate.

Having acknowledged Olivia Newton-John's extraordinary career achievements as well as the difficulties she faced with Soul Kiss, here is where we pause to argue that, while she might have faced an uphill climb in terms of continuing to cater to younger audiences, none of this might have mattered as much if only the album had been any good. In fact, the record's title track and best song peaked at No. 20, and although early reviews were lukewarm (as the Orlando Sentinel put it, "One Sheena Easton is enough"), initial sales were strong enough to reflect plenty of interest in her new music.

That interest waned rapidly once it came time to serve up the second single.

CAPTAIN VIDEO! has read numerous articles that describe "Toughen Up" as "reggae-flavored," which is kind of like saying cherry Kool-Aid is "cherry-flavored" — you can kind of get where it's coming from if you're in a charitable mood, but we all know it's nowhere near accurate. It's really just an '80s synth-pop number that fell to Newton-John after Tina Turner wisely passed on it, and while you can hear what Graham Lyle and Terry Britten were going for when they wrote it for Turner's voice, that doesn't absolve them for penning such a dull slog of a song. So little happens musically that its four-minute runtime feels twice as long.

Perhaps in a futile effort to prevent boredom from setting in before the bridge, director David Mallet — whose filmography at this point already boasted a bunch of videos from a long list of huge stars, including Blondie, Bowie, and AC/DC — decided to aim for pure silliness here. Or perhaps he didn't really want the gig, and was trying to get himself fired by pitching the concept for the clip you're about to watch. There's a long list of possibilities here, and the absolute least likely is the thought that anyone involved in the "Toughen Up" video actually thought it was any good.

It's probably important to note that Soul Kiss arrived at sort of a pivotal moment for the music video in general. During the medium's early years, all videos could basically be divided into two buckets: One, performance clips; two, weird-ass ones featuring all the kooky shit the label was willing to pay for. If it had been released during this period, the "Toughen Up" video wouldn't have seemed all that out of the ordinary, but in a post-Thriller world, this type of cheese was pretty pungent.

The concept, in a nutshell is this: Olivia Newton-John, decked out in riding gear and wielding a crop, is the helmet-coifed headmistress of some sort of finishing school for middle-aged women pretending to be girls. Striding into the classroom where her students are giggling on the floor, she educates them on the male psyche while pointing to a crude outline of a body:

For reasons likely known only to David Mallet, one of the students is also Olivia Newton-John, decked out in pigtails and a straw hat. She is repeatedly bonked on the head with that riding crop in time to the "reggae-flavored" beat.

After receiving instruction from Olivia, her students head home, where they put her lessons to work on their no-good boyfriends/husbands/etc. in ways that only made sense in early '80s music videos. When the first student's amorous advances are shrugged off by her man, who wants to watch football instead, she blows up the television and is immediately carried away by football players who bust through the living room walls:

The next one is pissed about her guy coming home late (and probably drunk) for dinner, so she roasts him on a giant spit:

These pictures tell you everything you need to know about the video's cartoonish vibe, which is at odds with the genuine message the song is trying to send, but we can't let this pass without noting that Mallet couldn't resist staging a Sandy and Danny redux, which ends with Newton-John's character punching her ersatz Travolta right out of the car:

Lest anyone be left wondering what this song is about, Mallet also slips this impressively unsubtle shot in toward the end, when the students are on the verge of fully breaking out into a class-concluding dance party:

And finally, for his concluding flourish, the director gives us a Burt Reynolds impersonator whose unwelcome advances result in him being assaulted by a roomful of short-skirted women and squeezed into some spare clothes they must have had lying around:

And with that, dear Videots, the Top 40 door slammed shut on Olivia Newton-John, never to reopen. She managed to eke out a few more adult contemporary hits with subsequent releases, but by the time she returned with her next album, The Rumour, in 1988, she was no longer receiving the type of promotion that signaled top-priority status at her label.

The silver lining in all this is that once she was unburdened by lofty sales expectations, Newton-John took advantage of the freedom to make albums she really felt like making. After The Rumour tanked, she cut a record of lullabies, released an LP of self-penned songs about her experience with breast cancer, and made her way back to country music — and while none of those records got the kind of attention afforded her earlier music, each of them felt like personal statements delivered on her own terms. Prior to releasing Soul Kiss, she really didn't have anything left to prove, but the fact that her story didn't end with this ridiculous video still counts as a tremendous victory.