The 1980s teen comedy has a lot of nostalgic value for many Gen Xers. After all, they were teenagers themselves when these movies came out, and for many of them, the films seemed to understand what they were thinking and feeling.
Unfortunately, over the course of 40 years, some jokes are not going to land the way they used to. Some of them are hard to even characterize as “jokes,” especially when they come at the expense of marginalized groups. Here’s our list of 1980s teen comedies that may have been amusing to some at the time but are profoundly problematic today.
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1. ’Weird Science’
1985
“Weird Science” tells the story of two bullied high school nerds. They are so terminally unable to find girls who will even make eye contact with them, they resort to the only plan left – they use a computer to design their own perfect woman, who emerges from a cloud of dry ice in the form of Kelly LeBrock. The mere notion that you could create a perfect woman was already not so hot when the movie came out, but “Weird Science” also has a very unfortunate moment in which Anthony Michael Hall’s character calls a party-crasher at his home a slur used to denigrate homosexuals. Unfortunately, that slur turns up quite a bit in many of these films.
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2. ‘Sixteen Candles’
1984
“Sixteen Candles” made overnight stars of Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall and also made director John Hughes the hottest of commodities. While this movie turns up on many lists of most beloved 80s movies, it’s a whole different experience watching it in 2024. Every time the Asian exchange student, “Long Duk Dong,” appears onscreen, he does so to the sound of a gong, and Anthony Michael Hall’s nerd character has nonconsensual relations with a girl who’s passed out, and it’s played for laughs. The fact that it happens offscreen doesn’t help.
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3. ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’
1986
“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” is a dumb, if mostly good-natured, film that centers around a high school student faking an illness so he doesn’t have to go to school that day. The reason it’s aged badly is not so much the script or the dialogue as the fact that it stars Jeffrey Jones as the school principal. This prolific actor, whose credits include “Beetlejuice” and “Amadeus,” was required to register as a sex offender in 2003 when he was accused of taking lewd photographs of an underage boy. If you know about that, it’s tough to watch this movie.
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4. ‘The Breakfast Club’
1985
“The Breakfast Club” depicted five high school students in an all-day Saturday detention for various infractions. It has aged poorly for several reasons, but don’t take our word for it. No less an authority than Molly Ringwald herself, who starred in it, said many years later that she had a lot of problems with her spoiled rich girl character ending up as part of a romantic pairing with Judd Nelson’s juvenile delinquent character, as he spends most of the movie subjecting her to verbal abuse, most of it sexual. But the real crime is the makeover that her character gave to Ally Sheedy’s goth character!
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5. ‘Say Anything…’
1989
“Say Anything…” is the story of a teenage loser (John Cusack) who just graduated high school and is smitten with his class valedictorian, played by Ione Skye. The only really problematic part is in a key scene in the movie in which Cusack turns up outside of Skye’s house at dawn with a boombox and blasts “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel at her open window. It’s supposed to be a show of love and dedication, but today, we refer to this as “stalking.”
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6. ‘Porky’s’
1981
We’ll say this for “Porky’s” – it’s not trying to be anything it isn’t. It’s a crass, gross, and misogynistic exercise, and proud of it! It has everything, from shower-peeping, fat-shaming, and slut-shaming, and to be fair, it was highly problematic from the very day it was released. It made a ton of money anyway, most likely from teenage boys in trenchcoats and fake mustaches who were pretending to be adults, and led to two sequels, 1983’s “Porky’s II: The Next Day” and 1985’s “Porky’s Revenge,” both of which also made a lot of money. Oh well, the universe doesn’t always reward virtue.
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7. ‘The Last American Virgin’
1982
The only thing separating “The Last American Virgin” from all the other teen comedies released in the 1980s is that the ending is a little sad. Otherwise, it’s a pretty standard teen romp, and its attitude toward the human urge to experience physical affection is depicted as crassly as possible. Like “Porky’s,” it also engages in fat-shaming and slut-shaming but becomes most depressing during a sequence in which our heroic main character and his buddies enlist a prostitute to deflower them, and they end up getting crabs from her.
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8. ‘Zapped!’
1982
“Zapped!” was a 1982 comedy starring Scott Baio and Willie Aames, and for that reason alone, we could probably say it aged badly. Baio plays a high school student who develops telekinetic powers via a process so tortuous we’re not even going to bother explaining it to you, and he spends most of the movie after that using said powers to magically disrobe his female classmates. A review in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said that it was hard to imagine the movie’s writers ” are even old enough to hold a pen.” If you ever wondered what the 1976 movie “Carrie” would be like if it ate lead paint chips daily for a year, look no further.
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9. ‘Private Lessons’
1981
In the 1980s, people were built differently. Namely, they didn’t consider the story of a teenage boy being educated in the ways of love by an adult to be a statutory offense. Instead, as in 1981’s “Private Lessons,” it was considered a situation rife with comic possibilities, so that’s the premise of the film, which starred European softcore star Sylvia Kristel in the role of the woman who teaches the ways of love to a 15-year-old boy. He is depicted on the poster as having to stand on a stack of books in order to kiss her because he’s still a child and hasn’t fully grown yet. Get it?
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10. ‘Soul Man’
1986
We’re taking a break from 1980s movies with alarmingly tone-deaf sexual elements to focus on one that’s utterly repugnant for entirely different reasons. “Soul Man” stars C. Thomas Howell as a white student who wants to go to Harvard, but is denied a student load, so he takes tanning pills and poses as Black. He spends the majority of the movie in blackface, and the Black characters in the film are unable to tell that he’s white. The movie makes a couple of weak attempts at seriousness to say yes, racism exists, but after 104 minutes of watching a dude in blackface, it’s hard to believe that was particularly sincere.
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