Every ’80s Song In Valley Girl Will Make You Want Your MTV — Like, Totally

Valley Girl is a jukebox teen musical dreamt up by a cool mom, played by Alicia Silverstone. It's all very The Princess Bride with Silverstone's Julie telling her teen daughter the story of her high school crush. Julie's story isn't about a princess, though, just a girl falling in love to some of the biggest hits of the '80s. It's safe to say, the Valley Girl soundtrack is like totally rad. Not unlike the movie it's based on: the 1983 teen comedy Valley Girl starring young Nicolas Cage.

The new film puts a Glee-esque spin on the story of a popular girl falling for a guy from the wrong side of the tracks. In order for this update to work, Valley Girl's writer Amy Talkington told Refinery29 that the movie's songs had "to be in the DNA of the script and the story. We worked really really hard to find songs that could tell our story and define our characters and create the tone that we needed."

"Moulin Rouge was sort of the inspiration for that," the film's director Rachel Lee Goldenberg added. "They re-produced and re-genred the songs to make sense in the story.

Goldenberg also wanted to pay tribute to the OG Valley Girl's soundtrack. They did this by turning Modern English's "Melt With You" — the unofficial theme of the original movie — into the love song at the center of this film, too.

"We worked really hard to not have it feel gimmicky, like we’re just throwing '80s songs in just to have them in," Goldenberg said. "The story and the emotions and the heart of the film is what was paramount, so we worked backwards to try and make it as close as possible — so that every single lyric could be aligned with dialogue in the movie."

The official Valley Girl soundtrack, out now, features acapella renditions of The Cure and mash-ups of Madonna and Hall & Oates that are great to Jazzercise to. However, our list highlights the original tracks that show up in this film in new ways. Back when "life was like a pop song," as Silverstone's Julie so poetically tells her daughter. "And we knew all the words." Now you will know them all, too.