Monday Music "Maniac" by Michael Sembello

I decided to run a few soundtracks for the next month, in the early 1980, if a movie came out, it released a soundtrack.  I never saw this movie believe it or not,  but I have the soundtrack on CD.  What can I say, I liked the music and it was a good album.  The video was memorable as was the song and it was a staple of the MTV rotation back in the day.

"Maniac" is a song performed by Michael Sembello. The song was used in the 1983 film Flashdance.
"Maniac" appears during an early scene in Flashdance and is used as the backing track of a montage sequence showing Alex (Jennifer Beals) training strenuously in her converted warehouse.
The song was included in Flashdance after Sembello's wife accidentally included it on a tape sent to executives at Paramount Pictures who were looking for music to use in the film.

Maniac" reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks beginning on September 10, 1983 and is one of the highest-grossing songs ever written for a film. In addition to producing "Maniac", Phil Ramone produced the song that would dethrone it from the top spot, Billy Joel's "Tell Her About It". The Original Soundtrack of Flashdance won the 1983 Grammy Award for Best Album of Original Score Written for A Motion Picture or a Television Special. The song was nominated for an Academy Award. Another song from the film, "Flashdance... What a Feeling" performed by Irene Cara, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1983

A popular urban legend holds that the song was originally written for the 1980 horror film Maniac, and that lyrics about a killer on the loose were rewritten so the song could be used in Flashdance. The legend is discredited in the special features of the film's DVD release, which reveal that the song was written for the film, although only two complete lyrics ("Just a steel town girl on a Saturday night" and "She's a maniac") were available when filming commenced. Like the title song, it reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in September 1983

Flashdance is not a musical in the traditional sense as the characters do not sing, but rather, the songs are presented in the style of self-contained music videos. The success of this film is attributed in part to the 1981 launch of the cable channel MTV (Music Television), as it was the first to exploit the new medium effectively. By excerpting segments of the film and running them as music videos on MTV, the studio benefited from extensive free promotion, and thus established the new medium as an important marketing tool for movies.
In the mid-1980s, it became almost obligatory to release a music video to promote a major motion picture—even if the film were not especially suited for one. An example from the era is the song and music video "Take My Breath Away" from Top Gun (1986), also from Flashdance producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. Giorgio Moroder composed "Take My Breath Away" and several of the songs for Flashdance.