Songfacts®:

• This was the first song Kenny Loggins did for the film Top Gun before he was given "Danger Zone," his big hit song from the film. Loggins co-wrote it with Starship producer Peter Wolf. The song is heard during the volleyball scene with Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer. >>>

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• Loggins credits the Synclavier, an early digital synthesizer, for producing the distinct drum sounds: "It had a way of processing the sounds and the math that was really... everything came out beautiful. You could really hear Synclavier drums different from all the other drums."
• The film producers did a cattle call for top songwriters and performers to pitch their ideas for songs for the movie. Loggins and Wolf, along with many others, went to a screening of an early cut of the film to get a feel for the scenes. Loggins said he and Wolf decided to write a tune for the beach volleyball scene because they figured everyone else would be scrambling for a shot at the main theme. While it was hardly central to the film's plot, the sequence was famous for its homoerotic display of the actors' oiled-up physiques and gratuitous flexing, soundtracked by a tune about cavorting with members of the same sex.
  
  It has been parodied often on TV shows like Family Guy ("Veteran Guy" - 2018), Future Man ("Operation: Fatal Attraction" - 2017), Hawaii Five-0("Poniu I Ke Aloha (Crazy in Love)" - 2017), It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia ("The Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 6" - 2013"), and Cougar Town ("Here Comes My Girl" - 2009).
• This was used in the 1990 volleyball movie Side Out, starring C. Thomas Howell.
• In the music video, Loggins performs this in a gymnasium while a battle-of-the-sexes volleyball game is under way.
• In 2021, Loggins released a new version featuring the Australian punk rocker Butterfly Boucher. He wanted to re-write it as a boy/girl duet because the 2022 sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, features both male and female pilots. He asked Boucher how she would rearrange the song if she were doing it with her band. "She came up with a pretty vibey groove and approach to it, added a couple new chords to it, and we wrote a new verse to it for our duet version," he told the Jeremy White podcast.