In an article for Rolling Stone titled, "Anglomania: The Second British Invasion", Parke Puterbaugh wrote of the impact of the song's music video on its US chart success, "Fronted by a singer-synth player with a haircut stranger than anything you'd be likely to encounter in a month of poodle shows, A Flock of Seagulls struck gold on the first try.

The members of A Flock of Seagulls would regularly visit Eric's Club in Liverpool, where one of the bands had a song called "I Ran".

Score noted that because A Flock of Seagulls would rehearse right after returning from Eric's, the song title and chorus may have got stuck in his head.

The band had gone there with the intent of securing a recording contract, and they wanted to use the poster, which featured a man and a woman running away from a flying saucer, as the cover for their first album, A Flock of Seagulls (1982).

With a chord progression of A-G-A-G in the verses and F-G-A in the choruses, the song is written in the key of A minor.

"[13] The single was promoted by a distinctive music video directed by Tony van den Ende in which the band members performed in a room covered in aluminum foil and mirrors.

[17] The song, the music video, and the band were an "irresistible" package for American audiences, and by the summer of 1982, "America was clutching A Flock of Seagulls to its heart".

[19] American pop-punk band Bowling for Soup recorded a cover of the song as a bonus track for the 2003 re-release of their album Drunk Enough to Dance.

The song's apparent references to the country of Iran were highlighted again in the fall of 2007, when the long-running American television show Saturday Night Live ran a parody version of the song that expressly mocked current Iranian policies like Holocaust denial.