We all have that one movie from the ’80s.

Maybe yours is Back to the Future. Maybe it’s The Breakfast Club, The Goonies or Say Anything. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the greatest movie ever made. It just has to be the movie that found you at exactly the right time and somehow never let go.

For Steve, that movie has always been Streets of Fire.

Walter Hill’s 1984 “rock & roll fable” gave us a strange and wonderful world of neon streets, roaring motorcycles, pounding music, Michael Paré, Diane Lane, Amy Madigan and a very young Willem Dafoe in one of the more memorable pairs of overalls in cinematic history.

It wasn’t a box-office hit. It never became the franchise its creators once envisioned. But Streets of Fire found its audience over the years, becoming a cult favorite with a visual style and soundtrack that remain unmistakable more than four decades later.

This week, we’re opening the Stuck in the ’80s archives and traveling back 15 years to revisit our original tribute to Streets of Fire, first released in 2011.

And after you've taken that trip back with us, maybe ask yourself: What was your special movie of the ’80s?

THE ’80s CRUISE

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Some ’80s bands sold millions of records. Some filled arenas. Some became so permanently embedded in pop culture that you can’t walk through a grocery store without hearing them over the frozen peas.

And then there are the bands that somehow found us anyway.

This week on Stuck in the ’80s, we’re celebrating Book of Love and a handful of other synth-pop bands that deserved a little more attention the first time around — and whose music might sound even better today.

Our centerpiece is a conversation with Book of Love singer Susan Ottaviano.

Book of Love arrived in the mid-’80s with a sound that never fit comfortably into one box. Were they synth-pop? New wave? Alternative? Dance? College rock? Maybe the fact that nobody could quite figure that out is one reason the music has aged so well.

Susan talks with Spearsy about the band’s beginnings, the influence of groups such as The Cure and The Slits, the importance of New York’s music and art scene, and what Book of Love learned when they suddenly found themselves touring with Depeche Mode.

There’s also a fascinating discussion about what happens to music decades after its original release. Songs get rediscovered. Movies and streaming introduce bands to people who weren’t alive the first time around. Music that once sounded like it belonged to a very specific moment can suddenly sound contemporary again.

And then comes our favorite question: the Podcast Time Machine.

If Susan could go back and change one moment in Book of Love history, what would she do?

Her answer: Get a better lawyer.

Ouch.

She also considers another tantalizing bit of alternate ’80s history: What might have happened if Book of Love had ended up on Mute Records, the label famously associated with Depeche Mode?

Susan also gives us an update on Book of Love’s future. This could be the band’s final full tour, although she says the group still plans to make more music.

After the interview, Brad and Spearsy keep the synthesizers plugged in for five more bands from the second half of the ’80s that they wish more people had discovered.

There’s Canada’s Kon Kan, whose “I Beg Your Pardon” brilliantly repurposed Lynn Anderson’s “Rose Garden” for the dance floor. Germany gives us Cetu Javu and Camouflage, two bands that inevitably drew comparisons to Depeche Mode. Australia contributes Boxcar, who had the unenviable task of bringing electronic music into a guitar-heavy pub-rock scene. And finally there’s Red Flag, whose story begins with brothers Chris and Mark Reynolds and takes a much sadder turn in the years that followed. Maybe that’s part of the fun of being Stuck in the ’80s after all these years. There are still bands to rediscover, songs that deserve another spin and stories we somehow missed the first time around.

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There really was nobody else quite like Dolly Parton.

In this special episode of Stuck in the ’80s, we remember Dolly — the songwriter, singer, actress, entrepreneur and wonderfully funny human being who somehow became a national treasure without ever seeming like she was trying to be one.

Joining us is longtime friend of the show Annie Zaleski, music journalist and author of the new book Dolly Parton: The Stories Behind the Songs. Annie takes us inside Dolly’s extraordinary songbook, from the classics everybody knows to the deeper cuts that reveal just how gifted a songwriter she really was.

Of course, we spend plenty of time in our favorite decade, when Dolly became a full-fledged pop-culture superstar thanks to 9 to 5, “Islands in the Stream,” The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, “Real Love” and a run of music and movies that made her seemingly impossible to avoid — not that anybody particularly wanted to.

But this episode is about more than the hits. It’s about what made Dolly different, why her music connected with so many people, the humor and humanity behind the rhinestones, and the enormous legacy she leaves behind.

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