You're the One That I Want
song written and composed by John Farrar, originally recorded by John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John in 1978
"You're the One That I Want," is a song performed by American actor and singer John Travolta and Anglo-Australian singer and actress Olivia Newton-John for the 1978 film version of the musical Grease. It was written and produced by John Farrar and released in 1978 by RSO Records as the second single from Grease: The Original Soundtrack from the Motion Picture. The song is one of the best-selling singles in history to date, having sold over 4 million copies in the United States and the United Kingdom alone with estimates of more than 15 million copies sold overall.
Background
"You're the One That I Want" was one of the two singles, along with "Hopelessly Devoted to You," that Farrar wrote specifically for Newton-John's appearance in the film that had not been in the original stage musical. Randal Kleiser, the film's director, was not fond of this song because he felt that it did not mesh well with the rest of the Warren Casey-Jim Jacobs score and the fifties style musically or lyrically.
Record World called it "a frantic, up-tempo duet between the two stars that is bound to leave listeners breathless."
Synopsis
Danny Zuko (Travolta), leader of the T-Birds, has recently lettered in cross-country running in an effort to win back his estranged girlfriend Sandy Olsson (Newton-John); unbeknownst to him, Sandy, who has been conflicted about her upright and proper etiquette in a school full of brash greasers, has herself transformed into a greaser queen to win back Danny. In the song, Danny expresses pleasant shock and arousal at Sandy's transformation, with Sandy responding that Danny must "shape up" to prove himself capable of treating her the right way.
The song originally written at this point in the original musical, "All Choked Up" (which had previously replaced a song titled "Kiss It"), was similar in theme, but different in style, written as a pastiche of Elvis Presley's "All Shook Up" and with Sandy being more provocative. "All Choked Up" was one of two songs from the Jacobs/Casey score that was excised completely from both the film and the film's soundtrack. Most 21st-century performances of the musical also include "You're the One That I Want" instead of "All Choked Up".
“You're the One That I Want” enters the record as song written and composed by John Farrar, originally recorded by John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John in 1978. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what You're, Want and song can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1281313. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1978.
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This entry incorporates text from “You're the One That I Want” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.