Pat Benatar had to fight to make "Shadows of the Night" a hit, and she won.
In her memoirs, according to Ultimate Classic Rock, Benatar recalled how her label at the time wasn't convinced that her version of the tune — written by D.L. Byron and already recorded by Helen Schneider and Rachel Sweet — would be a good fit for her fourth album, 1982's Get Nervous. But Benatar pressed on, tweaking the song's lyrics and building it into Get Nervous's anthemic lead single and the song which would earn her a third Grammy Award.
But we're not just here to talk about the song, one of Benatar's finest power ballads in a career full of 'em. We're here to talk about the music video, in which the pop-rock legend decided screw it, it was time to blow up some Nazis.
In 1982, when the "Shadows of the Night" video hit, MTV was still in its infancy, and that meant music video directors were still dialed into the idea of endless experimentation, crafting mini-narratives to go along with pop songs no matter how loosely they actually fit the theme of said songs. For "Shadows of the Night," Benatar and director Mark Robinson (who also went full Dracula for Eddie Money's "Think I'm In Love") envisioned a woman working in a factory on the World War II home front, dreaming of heroic deeds in Europe.
For the fantasy sequence, Benatar transformed from riveter to ace pilot and covert opts specialist, flying with her compatriots (including a very young Judge Reinhold) to blow up a Nazi base (including a very young Bill Paxton). "Shadows of the Night" isn't really about blowing up Nazis — it was originally written, then rejected, for a movie about teenage runaways, and the lyrics reflect that — but if Pat Benatar wants to blow up Nazis, Pat Benatar gets to blow up Nazis.
The result is one of the more intriguing artifacts of MTV's earliest years, a fun action movie romp that allowed Benatar to flex her theater kid muscles (though her band reportedly hated having to don period costumes) and play action hero for a few minutes. It's still a music video, and a song, that I'll put on anytime I need a lift. Or, you know, in case I feel like seeing some Nazis get blown up, which is an even bigger draw now than it was in 1982.
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