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My Five Favorite Teen Movies of the 1980s (Part One: ‘80-’84)
It was a great decade to be a teenager
If there’s one genre Hollywood has been cashing in on since James Dean swaggered across the screen in 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause, it’s the teen movie. These movies have always been a safe bet for filmmakers because they are cheap to make (rarely if ever needing CGI or exotic locales) and have a built-in audience. From Frankie and Annette’s Beach Party films in the 1960s to Mean Girls to Licorice Pizza (showing in theaters at this moment), the list of great (and so-bad-they’re-good) teen films is endless. Never was this more true than in the glorious 1980s.
The films of that decade reflected Generation X better than any sociologist could ever hope to. Like in our real lives, parents in these movies were either clueless or missing entirely. Video games were a fairly new thing, and they mattered (I once stood in line at an arcade for an hour to get my turn to play Space Invaders). And the music was, in a word, awesome.
I chose the teen films of the 1980s not simply because they were great movies, but also because they coincide with my own teen years. I was 14 in 1980, and even though I was 23 by the time Say Anything hit screens in 1989 it’s not like I’d matured that much since hitting my 20s. I think this is important…
