Legs & Co - "Funkytown"
Legs & Co - "Funkytown"
All I want for Christmas is sexy poinsettias come to life
Merry Christmas, Moves lovers!!! And if you’re not celebrating Christmas, I hope you are at least enjoying some time off this week to snack from a tri-flavor popcorn tin whilst sipping a whiskey and watching classic movies.
I’m excited that this month’s post falls on Christmas Day so that I can gift you with another Legs & Co delight, which originally aired on Top of the Pops on Christmas Day 1980. Behold, the eerie madness of the Legs & Co ladies stuck in some kind of playroom and dancing to Lipps Inc’s “Funkytown:”
First off: they’re dressed as white poinsettias, right? The first time I watched this, I thought they were some kind of Christmasy fairies. But then my smart friend Sharon pointed out that their crowns and elbow flair look a lot like the white leaves of a poinsettia plant:
Which makes a lot more sense for a Christmas show! Although… why not go with the more common red poinsettia? Perhaps red would pop too much on camera? TOTP historians, chime in! Anyway, I am going with this theory that they are white poinsettias come to human-sized life and their one Christmas wish is to march in place and dance with toys. Being Legs & Co, they are of course very sexy, shiny poinsettias wearing the cutest, most impractical boots:
Second: I love that Lipps Inc’s “Funkytown” was topping the charts at the end of 1980. What a fun, effervescent way to glide through the holidays and forget about the rise of Thatcherism! However: this was a real missed opportunity for the dancers and the band to merge together as a song-and-dance super group called Lipps & Legs & Co, Inc. The merch alone would be epic.
This number is pretty low-key for the Legs. While most of their dances use up a lot of the stage, here each lady is confined to their one little space, walled in by a small barrier of toys. I’d like to think this was to give them all a little break. It’s holiday times! Give them some easy choreo so they still have the energy to wrap all their gifts and go to parties after!1
There’s also a lot of cutting to the toys around them, which is nice to give some of the heavy lifting to the inanimate objects. I especially like this robot move right at the beginning:
Followed by the shot of the robot, as if it is saying, “Yes, Legs & Co, we are one:”
They make the best of their little dance zones, relying on a lot of marching and arm choreography, like this proto-macarena:
Also, shoutout to sweet baby Rosemary in the back! I’m so glad she has a dance partner, even if they’re separated by giant blocks:
There is a lot of improvising with the toys too, which again gives the Legs a nice little break from spinning around:
In a longer cut of this video the hosts explain at the end that all the toys shown are being donated to children all over the country, which explains their prominent placement in this dance number. How nice! But also… were there more? There have to be maybe 45 toys on that stage and surely there were more than 45 needy kids across the UK? Maybe Thatcher was already cutting into the toy distribution budget by 1980?2 Still, how cool to be a kid who got a toy that danced alongside Legs & Co on national television! Especially if you were the kid who got this groovy dog:
“Funkytown” is a solid way to close out 2023, just like it closed out 1980 for Legs & Co. It’s been a funky year, in every sense of the word. Let’s keep dancing our way through, with or without toys to dance with, and boldly march into 2024. Maybe we can make elbow flair happen?
BONUS: Do you live in NYC? Do you want to put something on your calendar for January to distract you from the endless cold and darkness?? Come to a bar and watch me read some of my writing! I’m delighted to be joining the Must Love Memoir reading series on Monday, January 8th at Jake’s Dilemma on the Upper West Side. Readings start at 7:30pm, but I will probably be there too early, nervously drinking wine in a corner. Come say hi and listen to some excellent writers read their work!
Have a funky (in the best way) holiday season and a happy new year! See you next month with more sweet moves.
Love and jazz hands,
Molly
What am I even saying. They’re all like 25 years old, max, and filled with enough boundless energy to do this dance, then go to a club until 2am, then pound a doner kebab, then wake up the next day feeling great and ready to wrap gifts.
I truly have no idea. Everything I know about Margaret Thatcher comes from The Crown and this Wikipedia article that I have just skimmed.
45 toys—GOOD catch!