It depends who you ask. The meaning of the flying car at the end of the 1978 film "Grease" is a hotly debated point of movie symbolism/trivia that has spawned both simple and crazy answers.

So, of course, we'll start with the crazy ones.

One grim theory posits that Sandra Dee was actually dead throughout most of the movie, and that the final scene is her flying off into heaven.

It goes like this: The backstory for Danny and Sandy's love affair is that he saved her from drowning (revealed in a line of the song "Summer Nights"). But what if he didn't save her after all? If so, then the whole movie is just her pre- (or post-, depending on your take on the afterlife) death fantasy.

Another even darker theory is that the line "Goodbye to Sandra Dee," at the end of the song "Look at Me I'm Sandra Dee (Reprise)," which is supposed to signal her change from good girl to bad girl, in fact signals her intention to commit suicide. Again, the flying car is taking her to heaven.

A much happier, and more reasonable, theory comes from literature professor Kim Edwards, who argues on her film-criticism blog that the flying-car scene is simply a fairy-tale ending to a '50s fairy tale that is "Grease."

Indeed, Edwards calls the movie a parody of the Cinderella story, and highlights other fairy-tale references throughout. She also points out that the movie never seems particularly concerned with realism.

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