The 1950s are long gone, but one of the ways it lives on in popular media is through Grease. Originally a stage musical, the 1978 big screen adaptation starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John still remains a classic enjoyed by many generations. For the most part, Grease is a movie that can be enjoyed by the whole family, but there's an especially morbid theory making its way around the internet that puts a damper on that. It discusses the idea that Sandy Olsson was dying during the whole story. You can read it for yourself below.
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This especially weird Grease theory (found on Imgur) begins by pointing out how the movie ends with Danny and Sandy leaving the fair in a car that soon breaks the laws of gravity and flies into the air. What's the deal with that? Well, the theory reminds readers that at the beginning of Grease, Sandy said in "Summer Nights" that Danny saved her life when she nearly drowned. Well, in fact, it's possible that she did drown, and in her final moments of life, she experienced a wondrous fantasy of her summer fling with Danny and a great year of high school with him and her new friends. As her brain is deprived of more oxygen, the vision gets more outlandish, until finally, as Danny makes one last attempt to save her, Sandy imagines them flying off in a car together. As the theory succinctly summarizes: "The entire movie was a drowning woman's coma fantasy."
As mentioned earlier, this Grease theory has been brought up several times before in recent years, and it could make sense to a degree. Aside from the red convertible going into the air, everything else in the movie follows the laws of physics just fine. Seeing the two protagonists suddenly fly away is a weird change of pace. However, this is also a story where people are breaking out into spontaneous song and already have dance numbers choreographed.
If you peel back too many of these layers, the whole thing falls apart, so just enjoy the magic of these two high schoolers from the '50s falling in love over the course of a year. Let's stay positive and assume Sandy didn't die on that that summer day and got to enjoy a life with Danny Zuko. Besides, if we assume that the events in Grease never actually happened, that also suggests that Grease 2 may not have happened either...although maybe that's for the best.
Whether you buy into this theory or not, it's not going to take away from how popular Grease is. The movie will celebrate its 40th anniversary in two years, and the story was most recently retold on Fox earlier this year in Grease: Live. It's clearly still beloved, so these characters will keep "living" on, drowning or not.
