Future director and son of pioneering filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles, Mario Van Peebles, stars as our hero, Rappin' John Hood, who basically replays the Breakin' formula here as he spearheads a plan to save an endangered neighborhood from evil developers courtesy of a big rap contest. Yes, it's the old "let's put on a show" musical routine, this time with a hip-hop twist. Van Peebles was a new leading man at the time, having been seen most widely at that point as a dancer in Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club (1984) and also the lead villain in Cannon's Exterminator 2 (1984).
Production for Rappin' began in Pittsburgh, PA on February 20, 1985 and wrapped on March 28, with an eclectic cast featuring All My Children's Tasia Valenza; The Edge of Night's Charles Flohe; future E.R. star Eriq La Salle; and TV favorite Kadeem Hardison, who would eventually become well known for the television series A Different World.
In May of 1985, Cannon head Menahem Golan asked Ice-T to perform a new rap song about the movie at the annual American Film Market (AFM) event. Ice-T was tasked with writing a press release explaining the meaning of terms like "word," "def," "frontin'," "B," "Chillin'" and "Maxin'." For example: "A lot of white breads still say 'right on.' Now it's simply 'Word.' Like if your friend tells you he's tired of being harassed by the police, 'The next time they come to the man, they gonna know some indignation.' 'Word' is your reply. Or say your girlfriend or boyfriend just ran off with the vacuum-cleaner salesperson. You say 'Word?' as in "No kidding?' when told of the catastrophe." In typical fashion, Cannon not only touted this film but announced a score of projects at AFM that never materialized including Dumb Dicks (which morphed into Detective School Dropouts, 1986), Godzilla vs. Cleveland, Give a Gal a Break, Who's in the Closet, Citizen Joe and most famously, Tobe Hooper's Spider-Man.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the ever contrarian Armond White was one of the few critics to laud the film in The Village Voice when it opened at the end of May. "Rappin' finds a near-perfect narrative context for a musical style that developed its own rhythmic intricacy and vocabulary through both parody and defiance of conventional pop music and 'proper' speech," he noted. "Taking the form of recitative that slides smoothly in to the self-contained meters of a song, the raps here are emblematic albeit in an entirely different league from hits by Run-DMC, Whodini and Grand Master Flash [sic]." In keeping with its prior successes, Cannon gave a big push to the film's soundtrack on vinyl and cassette, now a favorite entry in old school hip-hop collections to this day. The film now serves as a time capsule of an art form still in its early stages about to take its place on the world music stage.
By Nathaniel Thompson
