YMMV / Blue Thunder

• Awesome Music: The main theme by Arthur B. Rubinstein is a classic, unforgettable riff that shows up whenever the titular helicopter appears.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: The scene where Murphy and Lymangood peek into the house of the actress doing nude yoga.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • A heat-seeking missile hitting a skyscraper in a busy city, causing panic on the streets below, probably won't be depicted in a film this way again. Also, the building afterward looks a lot like the towers of the World Trade Center after impact.
  • The anti-Police Brutality/Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 put a special focus on the U.S.'s increasingly militarized police forces, especially in minority neighborhoods, which makes the Government Conspiracy here — deliberately stoke unrest in those neighborhoods and turn a high-tech helicopter on crowds just to sell more of them — frighteningly relevant. Not to mention that the cover story is to have a weapon to use to fight potential terrorist threats against the 1984 Summer Olympics, because the 2028 Games are also set to be held in Los Angeles. While he doesn't cite specific incidents, director John Badham's Trailers From Hell commentary for this film admits that its themes remain relevant today.
  • It's stated that with a dozen Blue Thunders you could run the entire country. As The War on Terror showed, Apache gunships and surveillance drones aren't enough to run a country if the populace is hostile and well-armed.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Two years later, the climax of Santa Claus: The Movie hinges on a near-identical Chekhov's Skill to this film's (the protagonist accomplishing a mid-air loop-the-loop). Most modern viewers would likely see the latter film first, making for a funny surprise once they're older and see this one!
• Retroactive Recognition: Daniel Stern as a rookie policeman, years before his more well known comedic roles in Home Alone and City Slickers.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The story reflects both lingering distrust of the U.S. military and government post-Vietnam and the tougher-on-crime policies that were being introduced in The '80s, particularly in minority neighborhoods. The cover story for the Government Conspiracy involves security for the then-nigh 1984 Summer Olympics. It's also easy to peg it to the early '80s in that the protagonist is not a nigh-invincible Stallone/Schwartzenegger type or a jovial everyman like Bruce Willis, the two dominant action hero types of the back half of the decade, but a grizzled Vietnam veteran played by Roy Scheider. An early scene outside a movie theater has Mommie Dearest up on the marquee, a giveaway to the film being shot over late 1981-early '82.
• Woolseyism: The Latin American translation of the film censors the part of Lymangood's final recorded message where he says that he figured out the "JAFO" nickname the other officers gave him meant "Just Another Fucking Observer" and has him say that he figured out what it meant and he will discuss it later with Murphy, turning it into a more poignant Deadly Deferred Conversation.

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