Tell me more, tell me more, is 40 really where it's at?

After all the high school drama (and accompanying musical numbers), the carnival scene in Grease gives the students of Rydell High a fairy-tale ending. Sandy, the virginal duckling, transforms into a red-stiletto-wearing swan; bad-girl Rizzo’s pregnancy scare vanishes; the Pink Ladies and the T-Birds pair off, as if under a love spell, and reformed delinquent Danny drives his shiny Ford convertible (technically Kenickie’s, but who cares?) into the sky, with Sandy by his side. In another film, it might all be too much. But for a musical like this, it’s perfect.

Not that there are other musicals quite like this one. Grease hit theaters in 1978, at a time when 1950s nostalgia was hot but movie musicals were decidedly not. Based on a raunchy Broadway show, Randal Kleiser’s film had an unproven cast (many members, including John Travolta, had appeared in the stage musical), pastiche musical numbers (albeit with sometimes filthy lyrics), and a tone so earnest you could barely make out the outline of a tongue gently planted in its cheek. Nevertheless, Grease was a hit — not just a hit but a sensation, the biggest film of the year and the highest-grossing movie musical of the century.

Forty years later, Grease is more beloved than ever. One could name many reasons — the catchy songs, the spirited dance numbers, the ageless cool of Travolta and Olivia Newton-John — but ask the cast, and they’ll tell you that the film is magic. The feel-good buzz that the audience gets watching Grease is exactly what the actors felt while they were making it. It’s what kept them dancing in leather jackets in the brutal Los Angeles heat. It’s what made them friends for life.

And nowhere is that joy more palpable than in the carnival scene, a 10-minute outdoor romp that brings the whole cast together for two last musical numbers: the Travolta/Newton-John duet “You’re the One That I Want” and the high-energy group number “We Go Together.” The film’s 40th anniversary may not be until June 16, but there is another 40th that took place this month: by 1978, with the Beatles eight years in his rearview mirror, John Lennon had stopped making music — and found himself vacationing apart from his wife and muse, Yoko Ono. That same year, a group of eclectic misfits from Athens, Georgia who called themselves the B-52s, released their first single, “Rock Lobster.”

The song was released 40 years ago this month on a small, now defunct label called DB Records. It was later rerecorded and rereleased as part of the band’s 1979 eponymous debut album on Warner Bros.

It’s a bizarre tune containing nonsensical lyrics and circus-like surf music, but it would prove deeply important to the B-52s (it launched them into stardom) and Lennon (it inspired him to team up with Ono and record the last songs of his life). But either way, I'm just grateful I was born ten years too late to give a crap about either.