Bananarama singer Sara Dallin said the song "played on the darker side (of summer songs): it looked at the oppressive heat, the misery of wanting to be with someone as the summer ticked by. We've all been there!" It was ranked number 44 on VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of the '80s. Billboard named the song #13 on their list of 100 Greatest Girl Group Songs of All Time.
"Cruel Summer" was not an immediate international success when it was released. Although it reached No.8 on the UK Singles Chart, its international popularity soared after its inclusion in the 1984 feature film The Karate Kid; this was a year after the song's original release (the song was released in 1984 in the U.S.). The group did not allow the song to be included on the film's soundtrack album, but it still reached No.9 in the U.S., their first top ten hit there. When Bananarama were still struggling to make money in their early years, they even performed the song at a beauty contest in Hawaii.
The song has since been revived in various forms. It has appeared in several television commercials, and was covered by other acts, such as Ace of Base, who scored an international hit with it (their version even reached gold in the US), and Blestenation on the Blue Crush soundtrack. In 2003, Swedish electronica female artist Sophie Rimheden sampled the beat and bassline from the song on the track "In Your Mind" of her album HiFi. In 2011, Athens, Ohio-based rock band Downplay covered the song on their album Beyond the Machine.
Since its success, the group have recorded another three versions of the song. "Cruel Summer '89" was recorded with new member Jacquie O'Sullivan in 1989, and given a new jack swing makeover. It reached number 19 on the UK singles chart in June. This version was not included on any Bananarama album until 2005's Really Saying Something: The Platinum Collection.
Another version of the song was recorded and featured on their 2001 album Exotica. This version featured Latin instrumentation and additional lyrics, but it was not released as a single. They released another updated version in 2009, as a B-side of their single "Love Comes".
The song was also featured as the theme tune of the first series of Trouble's reality show of the same name, where a group of young adults was sent off to a holiday camp, only to be tortured and humiliated in an attempt to win a large sum of money.
The music video was shot in New York City in the summer of 1983 and features a take on the American TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, with a bumbling cop duo who chase the girls as they make their escape in a truck (at one point, Bananarama members throw bananas at a trailing police car).
"[It] was just an excuse to get us to the fabled city of New York for the first time," Siobhan Fahey has said. She recalled the shoot, conducted during a heatwave, as a difficult experience. "It was August, over one hundred degrees. Our HQ was a tavern under the Brooklyn Bridge, which had a ladies' room with a chipped mirror where we had to do our makeup."
After an exhausting morning shooting in the city in brutal August heat, the band returned to the tavern for lunch. They made the acquaintance of some local dockworkers, who, upon learning of their situation, shared vials of cocaine with them. "That was our lunch" said Fahey, who had never tried the drug before. "When you watch that video, we look really tired and miserable in the scenes we shot before lunch, and then the after-lunch shots are all euphoric and manic."
The music video for the 1989 remix was a compilation of different shots from Bananarama's earlier videoclips. Notably missing are clips from the original 1983 video. Fahey is only featured in a pair of frames. Bananarama were unable to record a proper video for the song, because they were in the middle of a world tour at the time of its release.
As well as being featured in The Karate Kid, the song is featured in the Knight Rider episode "K.I.T.T vs K.A.R.R". It was also featured during the end credits of The Final Girls.
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