John Travoltas breakthrough part was Danny in the musical 'Grease'. Travolta had played the part of Kenickie in the Broadway version, but when the crew begun making a movie out of it, John aimed for the biggest part. Olivia Newton-John plays Sandy, the girl from Australia that Danny falls in love with. But as they are completely different, Danny being a tough guy and Sandy a nice girl, we have a nice little 'Romeo and Juliet' story.
Grease made a star out of Travolta, so he was the only choise when the Ultimate Disco Movie 'Saturday Night Fever' (=SNF) was made. In 'Grease' we could see that Travolta actually can dance, in SNF the dancing is not only an idea for the movie, it is the movie. Travolta plays Tony, the King of the dance floor and "hunk of the century".
Ok, now on to compairing these two movies. First of all, Travolta not only plays the leader of the pack and every girls dream in both movies, he also walks the same way, a bit Ace Ventura'ish. So it's quite clear that the SNF-makers only wanted the star Travolta became after Grease, they didn't want the actor Travolta. This leads to SNF being too much about the character of Tony and his dancing.
A big difference is that 'Grease' is just a story being told. nothing more, nothing less. They don't even try to make it seem like an actual event. SNF on the other hand, is supposed to be a reality-like story, and that's where the movie suffers. It doesn't seem like something that would just happen. Where 'Grease' is just a qute story with all the nice clichées - not being too sweet, SNF just goes a bit too far in being a fantastic story.
Both movies are worthy seeing, they still are two very important movies in the movie history, but we liked 'Grease' better. It was much more fun, not overdramatised and it was the original John Travolta, SNF had John Travolta play the part of John Travolta.
