Though the musical was not nominally a popular genre in the 1980s, it can be argued that many of the inherent structures of the musical, as well as their oscillation between episodes of spectalce in the form of song and dance, became sublimated during the decade into what became labelled as the 'MTV Aesthetic'. This paper analyses Top Gun (1986), Highlander (1985), and Good Morning Vietnam (1987) as examples of films which, to one degree or another, represent the musical dimensions of non-musical genre films in the 1980s
Harvey O'Brien (Fri,) studied this question.