So you think you’re pretty across Grease, right? You can belt out ‘Summer Nights’ with the best of them, you know how to hand jive, and you even know the more obscure references in ‘Look At Me, I’m Sandra Dee’. But did you know it has a song about showing people one’s bum?
To be fair, it’s not in the film. However, if your family had the Grease movie’s official soundtrack LP you might be aware that there’s a ballad on side three called ‘Mooning’.
You might assume was cut because it doesn’t seem to further the plot: a guy sings about mooning after a girl who remains immune to his charms.
But actually, it’s because there was a small change in the characters between stage and screen, and also it wasn’t nearly as innocent as it seemed.
In the film there’s a T-Bird named Putzie (the blonde one), but in the original musical his name was Rump because he liked to flash his bum at people all the time.
And ‘Mooning’ was the character’s big number, based on the presumed-hilarious fact that mooning is both a term for wistfully yearning for someone, and for flashing arse at them.
Hence pun-tacular lines like “I guess I’ll keep striking poses / Until my cheeks have lost their roses” and
Sure, maybe having a character drop trou throughout the film would be a little ribald for a slumber party classic. However, given the utterly filthy lyrics to ‘Greased Lightning’, it’s entirely possible that Rump was actually considered too sophisticated and high-falutin’ for the film’s tone.
History, sadly, does not record.