The Dance Shows of the 80s · A Complete Guide

Put some people on a floor, play the records everyone already likes, and point a camera at it. It is the cheapest format in television and one of the most durable, and in the 1980s there were enough versions of it running at once that they had to differentiate themselves by gimmick: a countdown, a nightclub, a lip-sync contest, a panel of judges. This page indexes what this site documents about all of them.

The main dance and music shows of the 80s were American Bandstand, which spent the decade being made obsolete by MTV, Solid Gold, whose famous dancers existed to fill the gap when recording artists would not appear, Club MTV, taped inside a New York nightclub from 1987, Puttin' on the Hits, the lip-sync contest that ran from 1984, and Dance Party USA, the daily cable show that ran from 1986 to 1992.

The countdown shows

The full story of Solid Gold explains the format's central problem better than any other page here. The show counted down the week's biggest records, and the artists who made those records mostly would not fly back to Los Angeles every seven days to perform them. The Solid Gold Dancers were the solution to a booking problem. It premiered in September 1980 with Dionne Warwick hosting and ran to July 1988 across 332 episodes.

American Bandstand in the 80s is the other side of the decade: the institution that invented the format watching a cable channel do its job with videotape and no teenagers. ABC cut it to a half hour in 1987, Dick Clark took it into syndication rather than accept that, and it finished on the USA Network in October 1989.

The gimmick shows

The full story of Club MTV covers the most efficient version anyone built: a television truck parked outside the Palladium on East 14th Street, a nightclub converted to a studio by noon, and fifteen half-hour episodes taped across a single Sunday and Monday. It premiered August 31, 1987 and ran to June 1992.

The full story of Puttin' on the Hits covers the one that removed the records entirely and kept the performance. Amateurs miming to hit songs in costume, judged for cash, from September 1984 to July 1988. It is the direct ancestor of every lip-sync battle since.

The full story of Star Search sits in this cluster for a structural reason rather than a thematic one, and the reason is worth stating: Star Search and Solid Gold were created by the same man. Al Masini built both, both were developed with Bob Banner, and both were designed for independent stations that needed programming the networks were not selling them. The talent competition and the dance countdown are the same business idea pointed at two different kinds of performer.

The economics underneath all of them

These shows existed because they were cheap, and occasionally the record shows exactly how cheap.

Ernest Chambers, who produced the pilot for Dance Fever, published a first-person account of that production in 2023. In it he describes a set that the record label Casablanca had underwritten for two Merv Griffin talk-show tapings, and Griffin reusing the leftover disco set to shoot a dance pilot. Chambers says his model was The Arthur Murray Dance Party, and that 20th Century Fox insisted the show have a format and a host before it would proceed.

Two things in his account do not reconcile with the archival record, and neither has been resolved by anyone. The record credits Merv Griffin as creator; Chambers says he was hired to conceive the format and produce the pilot, and that he lost the "Created by" credit in a dispute he took to the Writers Guild of America West. The archival record counts 234 episodes; Chambers says he was paid a royalty on 390. Both positions are on the record and this site does not adjudicate between them.

What the account illustrates, and the reason it appears on a guide page rather than a show page, is the production logic the whole genre ran on. A nationally syndicated series existed in part because a set was already paid for by somebody else.

The daily one

Dance Party USA ran on the USA Network from April 1986 to June 1992, which made it the longest-running daily version of the format in the decade, and it is documented separately and in far more depth on this site's archive.

• The Dance Party USA guide is the main entry point.
• The year guides cover 1986, 1987 and 1988.
• Dancin' On Air is the Philadelphia show it came out of and shared a studio with, and the comparison between the two sorts out why they are so often confused.

The honest bottom line

The dance show is not a prestigious form and nobody who made one has pretended otherwise. They were built because airtime is expensive and a floor full of people dancing to records already made is not. The countdown existed to organise material the show could not afford to book live, the nightclub version was shot fifteen episodes at a time to avoid paying for fifteen days, and at least one of them existed because a record company had already bought the furniture.

What survives is the thing the cheapness could not touch. Every one of these shows put ordinary people on television and let them be the attraction, at an hour when the alternative was a professional. The formats were disposable and interchangeable. The floor was not, and the floor is the part every one of these pages ends up being about.

Sources

• This is an index page. It makes no factual claim of its own: every show, date, network and episode figure named here is carried from the individual page it links to, and each of those pages carries its own sourcing. Nothing on this page is asserted that is not already sourced downstream, with one exception, stated in the open.
• The exception is the Ernest Chambers account of the Dance Fever pilot, which appears only on this page because the show it describes has no page of its own on this site. It is attributed to Chambers by name and year where it is used, and the two points where his account and the archival record disagree are carried side by side rather than resolved.

Part of 80s kids TV. The making-of pages for every show above are indexed at the full story.

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