![]() ![]() “The Valley was hot in the summers, so a lot of people really did hang out in our malls. “ gave people the visuals for the whole mall culture of the San Fernando Valley,” says Amy Asbury, author of Valley Girl: Childhood in the 80s. The Galleria is the setting for a good portion of Fast Times’ plot, and, as presented onscreen, it is a vivid, self-sustaining world far removed from the prying eyes of grownups. “ Fast Times was really adopted as a Valley thing, because it showed the Sherman Oaks Galleria and a lot of Valley streets, even though it had nothing to do with the Valley,” says Roderick. Los Angeles Public Library photo collection Fast Times didn’t specify a geographic setting, but its use of real Valley locations marked it as a quintessential “Valley” film.Ī Madonna look-alike contest at the Sherman Oaks Galleria in 1985. The Sherman Oaks Galleria, then a new mall, became a star after it was used as a central location in Amy Heckerling’s 1982 surprise hit Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Shopping malls such as the Northridge Fashion Center, Sherman Oaks Fashion Square, The Promenade in Woodland Hills, Topanga Plaza and the Glendale and Sherman Oaks gallerias anchored towns from Canoga Park in the West Valley to Glendale in the east, and they had become watering holes for the region’s teenage residents. Between 19, the population more than quintupled, rising from 228,000 to over one million. It was a different Valley then.īy the time Valley Girl was released in June 1982, the San Fernando Valley had transformed from the pastoral landscape captured in Crosby’s song. But its depiction of the Valley was a world away from Zappa’s.įor audiences of the 1940s, the largely rural swath of land dotted with small bedroom communities represented a bucolic escape from the madness of the big cities. “A popular 1940s movie starring a singing cowboy was called San Fernando Valley and Bing Crosby, the country's most popular singer, made the theme into a hit song of World War II.” “We all grew up surrounded by movie and TV stars and saw familiar places on screen all the time,” says Roderick. It’s not that the San Fernando Valley had never been depicted onscreen or in song. “From the film Chinatown to the Boyz n the Hood soundtrack and all that, the Valley just gets completely left out, and that's still true.” “So much of the rest of Los Angeles is just mythologized, whether for good or for bad,” says Laura Barraclough, an assistant professor at Yale who wrote the 2011 book Making the San Fernando Valley: Rural Landscapes, Urban Development, and White Privilege. You can view all of our Valley Week stories here. This story was part of Curbed LA’s Valley Week, a celebration of culture, real estate, architecture, and neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley. Los Angeles had been depicted on film and in music for decades, but the Valley was largely overlooked. ![]() “I don't think anybody thought were ‘reality,’ but they formed a detailed picture for a lot of people,” says Valley native and LA Observed publisher Kevin Roderick, who wrote the 2001 history The San Fernando Valley: America’s Suburb But even as more diverse and multifaceted pop-cultural representations of the Valley have sprung up, its reputation is in some ways still tied to the music and films of the early 1980s. In the 35 years since the Zappas’ song hit the airwaves and kicked off a nationwide craze, the landscape and demographics of the San Fernando Valley have changed, in some ways dramatically. The image was reductive but potent-and it took off. For many Americans, it was their first introduction to the 260-square-mile region located just north of the Los Angeles Basin, and the portrait it painted was a vapid cultural wasteland of shopping malls and not much else. Valley Girl gave a scattered geographical overview of the San Fernando Valley, with references to such locations as Encino, the Galleria, and Ventura Boulevard. Instead of taking the musician’s scathing critique of American consumerism to heart, listeners paid more attention to his daughter Moon Unit Zappa’s “Val-speak” lyrics: “barf me out,” “gag me with a spoon,” “bag your face,” “tubular.” It’s a most depressing place.” Maybe he was angered by the public’s largely uncritical response to the song. “People think Valley Girl is a happy kind of song, but it isn’t,” Frank Zappa told Billboard magazine after his satirical 1982 tune became a surprise radio hit. ![]()
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