Posted on Tue, Jul. 22, 2008

Like the smash Broadway musical that spawned it, Mamma Mia! would not exist without ABBA. The movie is simply an excuse for the famous likes of Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Christine Baranski and Julie Walters to run around like lunatics on a beautiful Greek island, stopping every few minutes to belt out another classic ABBA ditty such as Dancing Queen or Take a Chance on Me.

It is a testament to how well the Swedish pop group's '70s and early '80s hits have endured that Mamma Mia! fared respectably againt the onslaught of The Dark Knight, grossing $27.6 million over its opening weekend. When the foursome split after a world tour in 1982, most pundits predicted that ABBA's frothy music would evaporate under edgier trends in music.

But during the early 1990s grunge era, a compilation of old singles, ABBA Gold, wound up selling 25 million copies worldwide. The soundtrack for the new movie also splashed onto The Billboard 200 this week. But Mamma Mia! is certainly not the first movie to use ABBA's music to put its audience into an upbeat mood.

More than two dozen films have included at least one ABBA song on their soundtracks. Here's a list of the three most-often used ABBA tunes in movies, ranked by number of appearances:

No. 1: The undisputed champ is Dancing Queen, which has been used in seven films, including last summer's Adam Sandler comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and Spike Lee's period drama Summer of Sam. It makes sense, since the song was the group's only single to hit No. 1 on American charts. (The other movies it pops up in: Mamma Mia!,Muriel's Wedding, Dick, Man of the House, the German documentary KlassenLeben).

No. 2: Mamma Mia! has been used in four films, including The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which gave two drag queens and a transgender cabaret singer something to perform in the middle of the Australian outback (Also appears in: Mamma Mia!, of course; Muriel's Wedding and the Swedish comedy Anglagard).

No. 3: Also appearing in four movies is Fernando, the only one of these three songs that does not pop up in Mamma Mia!, but it was one of the tunes a lonely young woman used to escape her miserable existence in Muriel's Wedding -- which, with apologies to all the Mamma Mia! fanatics, is far and away the best ABBA movie ever made. (Also in: Priscilla, Anglagard, Summer of Sam).