One Sunday afternoon a couple of years ago, your NUB staff was sitting on the couch, flipping through TV channels, bored. Hard to fathom, I know, but play along. As one of the movie channels began their showing of 1980's John Travolta/Debra Winger mechanical-bull picture, Urban Cowboy, we watched with a certain bemused detachment. By the film's close, we had laughed, we had cried, we had wet ourselves. We had reeled to the din of Charlie Daniels' Cherokee fiddle and thrilled to the unpredictable, bone-bothering antics of that wiliest of nocturnal creatures, the Bull. We were fucking sold on Urban Cowboy.

The movie is the saga of Bud Davis (Travolta), a dim bulb oil pipeline worker from Spur, Texas, who joins his aunt and uncle in the comparatively cosmopolitan outskirts of Houston (where they dwell in an excessively creepy E.T.-style tract home) to experience ... well, we're never really sure. Bud soon discovers some truths about Houston, however: the Lone Star brew is colder, the girls are prettier, and the bull is a-buckin' at Gilley's, the biggest damned bar in the world. Minutes into the film, Bud has shaved his big, dumbass beard, chucked his straw hat for a proper Stetson and taken up residency at Gilley's as a strutting two-fisted mamajama.

Much of the movie's action takes place in this 3 1/2 acre monstrosity, run by toad-like country-Vegas crooner Mickey Gilley and second home to thousands of rawboned shitkickers who gather night after night to get plastered, ride the bull, and beat the piss out of each other. (Rumors of Gilley's, which was, unbelievably, a real place, reopening have come about. If it happens, we're going there. Ah, yeah.) Other attractions include a punching bag attraction and the music of Johnny Lee, a man so hirsute he has standing hair on his shoulders. Lee dented the charts with "Lookin' For Love," a smoky concoction that serves as the film's "love theme."

Bud finds love almost immediately with Sissy (Winger), a tow truck-driving tomboy who is at least as stupid as he is. Sissy's primary personality traits are her strong-willed stubbornness and predilection for spaghetti-strap tank tops. The two get hitched at Gilley's, and happily ever after begins, replete with matching 'Bud' and 'Sissy' license plates in the rear window of his pickup.

No more than a month passes before, through a complex series of incidents and the introduction of ex-con Wes Hightower into the mix, newlywed bliss turns ugly - real ugly. Bud takes up with pretty debutante Pam, while Sissy and Wes shack up in a run-down trailer just behind Gilley's.

Urban Cowboy culminates in the big mechanical-bull showdown between Bud and Wes against the menacing backdrop of "The Devil Went Down To Georgia." Wes, experienced in prison rodeos, fully expects to win the $5,000 first prize and move deep into Mexico with Sissy, while Bud only seeks to honor the memory of his now-late uncle (who was fatally disintegrated in a lightning storm at the refinery).

In the end, true love wins out over stupid macho pride, and everyone goes home happy. And while Urban Cowboy is really a Texas-sized turd of a movie, there are lessons to be learned from the tragic characters portrayed here (see table below).