Well, now you've made it to my Top Gun page. Congrats. This is the most extensive and best maintained page on the site. The movie means a lot to me, due to a bunch of strange reasons I can't find words for. Every time I watch it, I end up having to fight off ungodly bouts of nostalgia-induced emotion or trying to stifle often-inappropriate laughter due to massive amounts of inside jokes. The imagery is my constant source of inspiration. The soundtrack to this movie is the soundtrack to my life (...in more ways than one, let me tell you. It's ingrained in my subconscious by this point).
Care to hear the backstory that brought about this one? (If not, feel free to scroll down beyond this paragraph and the next and hit the links for the trivia and/or photo sections...)
It's a bit random, really. Way back in my freshman year of high school, my best friend and I were wandering through our local Blockbuster. It was the Friday before a three-day weekend, and we were looking for something to occupy our time. We came across a handful of movies we hadn't seen before, and were about to leave when I noticed Top Gun on the bottom shelf. I knew Val Kilmer (our favorite actor at the time) was in it, so I picked it up and flipped it over to read the blurb on the back. My mother noticed what I was holding on to and commented that she hated the movie, but if we wanted to rent it, we could. We stuck it on top of the pile, figuring it would be our contingency plan if we didn't like one of the other movies or if we ran out of things to do. Well... We ran out of things to do. We popped Top Gun into the DVD player around midnight and were sucked in instantly. As soon as the movie was over, I raided kitchen junk drawer for my uncle's aviator sunglasses and we got to work on our first co-authored fanfic. Four years later, it's still in progress. We've got about 300 pages and we're only about half done (we're starting to consider it a neverending work-in-progress... With bloopers. We save everything). Because of this fic, we have an unbelievable amount of inside jokes concerning Top Gun. I'll try to avoid putting them in here for your sake...