10 Movies GenX Took Way Too Seriously

From Jaws to Top Gun to The Karate Kid, here are 10 movies GenX took ridiculously too seriously and the real-world chaos they actually caused.

Ok, so this is a new series I’m going to try. I’m taking a couple of days off from publishing a “Things that Screwed Up GenX” post. Man, some people are grumpy about those. Sheesh. They are upset that I’m pointing out bad or inappropriate things about their beloved classic movies. Who knew?

Anyway, this series is dedicated to the power of movies, yay! It looks at the movies that GenX took ridiculously too seriously. I mean, no one can get mad about this, right? Taking Karate lessons because a movie shows a kid from New Jersey breaking all the rules and bullying the locals, nothing can go wrong with that, right? Yes, movies are powerful, but the generation that doesn’t ever seem to overreact to anything routinely overreacted to cartoonishly silly movies. Hmmm, yeah, I’m gonna get more hateful comments. Yes, I rode in on this horse, but you don’t have to make it feel bad for bringing me here. Anyway, this is a look at movies that GenX took too seriously. Were you afraid of going in a swimming pool after seeing Jaws? Be honest. Did your parents dressing in disastrous disco ever ruin any of your family events? If you shared in the tortures and triumphs of these movies, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Am I saying GenX might have overreacted to these movies? Yeah, kinda. Am I saying these movies are ridiculous in their influence? Probably. Am I saying movies are powerful forces in the world that go out and do things we don’t expect? Absolutely. So don’t get all bent out of shape about these facts and observations, ok. There is no reason to throw rotten verbal fruit at me in the comments. Anyway, I hope you enjoy 10 movies that GenX took way too seriously.

1. The Karate Kid — Directed by John G. Avildsen, 1984

What a movie, eh? It came back as a Netflix series after 40 years. We really can’t let this kid from New Jersey go. The movie was a “sleeper hit,” meaning Hollywood didn’t expect it to do as well as it did. It scored 91 million dollars on an 8 million dollar budget. That’s big for 1984. The movie was a smash hit but was still the 5th highest grossing movie of the year behind movies like Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins, and Beverly Hills Cop, so it was in good company.

If you have been living under a rock for the last 40 years and haven’t seen The Karate Kid, it follows Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio), a teenager who moves with his mother from New Jersey to Los Angeles and immediately runs into trouble with a gang of karate-trained bullies led by Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka), a student at the ruthless Cobra Kai dojo. LaRusso is beat up a few times until he is saved by Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), who is a highly trained martial artist who, in order to keep the peace, trains Daniel to fight in the All Valley Under 18 Karate Tournament. Yep, it’s one of those movies. It’s over the top and filled with Karate.

The movie has a lot of heart, and it is well acted and has a great over-the-top triumphant, full-of-cheese ending. Yes, the movie is cheesy, let’s admit it. The training of LaRusso waxing on and waxing off was way more integrated into our lexicon than I was ever comfortable with, but hey, it was a nice little twist in the movie.

I can remember when it came out. I went to the theater and saw it, and by about mid-summer me and the neighborhood kids were having Karate tournaments in my front yard. I remember one particular time where this kid Chris and my buddy Jim were “sparring” (none of us knew Karate, we were just kicking each other and falling down). Chris kicked Jim in the shin and broke his big toe and cried all the way home. That was something I guess they taught you in Karate class, how to not break your toes on people.

Well, this brings me to taking this way too seriously. Like fighting in our front yard wasn’t enough, several of my friends signed up for Karate. They weren’t the only ones. Kids went bananas over this movie. If you were being bullied, the best thing to do was learn Karate. Josh signed up. I wanted to, but wasn’t allowed. U.S. martial arts schools reported 30-50% increases in new students between 1984-1986. The American Taekwondo Association (ATA) roughly doubled in the mid-1980s, growing from about 40,000 to over 80,000 students. The YMCA reported karate class enrollment tripling. Everybody really was Kung Fu fighting over this movie.

So yeah, watching a kid learn Karate by waxing cars and sanding the deck made an entire generation of kids take lessons. I never took Karate, but man I really wanted to.

2. Jaws — Directed by Steven Spielberg, 1975

Yes, I love Jaws. No, I don’t think Jaws is a perfect movie. It was the first summer blockbuster though, and it’s one of the best directed movies of all time. It was so well received that there was a surveyed 25% drop in beach attendance. Beach towns reported that after the movie opened, tourism went through the floor.

So beach vacations dried up a around the time of Jaws. If you don’t know, Jaws is of course about a shark attack in a New England town, where the town sheriff wants to shut down the beaches but the mayor refuses, and you get people dying in shark attacks. There’s more to it than that, but you get the idea.

I can remember being afraid to go in a swimming pool or a local river after Jaws. Yes, I was one of the many who took this movie way, way too seriously. I don’t care that there are no sharks or fish in that pool, I’m still going to be eaten when I get in it. I was freaking terrified to go in the lake. Yes, I grew up a short 15 minute drive from the lake, and I have some memories of sitting on the beach and looking at the water and refusing to go in because I had seen Jaws. If I’m honest, anytime I go in the ocean to this day, it always occurs to me that a shark may be just inches away.

Just as a sidenote, I’ve noticed that the Jaws fear in the water, even the lake or a pool, that one that jumps up inside you just for a second, even as an adult, seems to be the same exact fear that you get when you turn the lights off downstairs and then have to run up the stairs for no reason because whatever wasn’t there in the light is now going to kill you. Have you ever noticed that? Anyway, I digress.

I would say there are people who are afraid to go in the water every year since the movie was made, but we might be taking this movie too seriously. You are 1,200 times more likely to get struck by lightning than bitten by a shark. You have a better chance of being killed by a cow collapsing in a field than being attacked by a shark. Deer kill 25 times more people than sharks do. Think of that. You have a better chance of being killed by Bambi than being attacked by Jaws.

So yeah, we might have overreacted a little bit, might have taken it way too seriously, but if I had gone in Lake Erie when I was 11 years old a shark would have surely eaten me, and there isn’t anything you can tell me that will change my mind about that. Yes, the power of movies is strong with this one.

3. Indiana Jones / Raiders of the Lost Ark — Directed by Steven Spielberg, 1981

Every GenX kid loved this movie for good reason. Raiders of the Lost Ark not only was an amazing film, it launched a franchise of some of the best, and as of late, worst films about tomb raiding. I mean, that’s what they are doing, right? Indiana is a tomb raider. He’s breaking into ancient places and taking stuff and putting it in museums. Let’s forgo the argument here that Indiana plays no role in this movie. Yes, everything would have worked out exactly the same if he wasn’t in it. That doesn’t matter. As a kid, this movie was it.

We loved this movie. If you don’t know, Raiders of the Lost Ark follows Professor Indiana Jones on an adventure to save the Lost Ark of the Covenant. It has the 10 Commandments in it, and according to the Bible has the power of God. Any army that carries the Ark cannot be defeated. Hitler getting his hands on the Ark may mean the end of the world as we know it. So Indiana has to embark on a daring excavation to find it. Yes, I said excavation. This is an archaeologist movie. A movie about a heroic archaeologist. Have you ever met an archaeologist? I met a couple in college. I don’t think they are very daring or adventurous, but that’s what this movie is about.

It also brings me to my point. When the movie came out there was a documented phenomenon called the Indiana Jones Effect. Yes, they named it after the movie because when the movie came out, universities around the world saw a massive explosion in sign-ups for archaeology courses and degrees. A movie about a 1930s archaeologist who seems to break all the rules of archaeology, goes after the Ark of the Covenant, and fights Nazis inspired GenX to become archaeologists. I think this is like The Last Starfighter inspiring people to sign up to learn to fly airplanes, right? I mean, Indiana Jones at his heart is a tomb raider, and many archaeologists say that he basically defies every rule of archaeology. I didn’t even know archaeology had rules.

I can remember watching Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time, and I don’t even think I realized he was an archaeologist. I didn’t know what that was at the time. I also played that Atari video game that was supposed to be Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I just kept falling to my death because I couldn’t find a parachute. There were no instructions with the game dammit. I digress again. Anyway, the movie has its own actual phenomenon named after it.

There aren’t hard numbers to back this up, or I would give them to you, but it is a real documented thing that even the actor John Rhys-Davies (who played Sallah) has been approached by hundreds of people saying they went into archaeology because of the movie. What? Why would you admit that? These were apparently archaeology professors.

Anyway, we can all agree this is a little much, right? GenX signing up in droves for a profession because of a movie that really has little or nothing to do with anything in reality around archaeology? The effect is real, look it up.

4. Top Gun — Directed by Tony Scott, 1986

Yes, Top Gun, the movie with Tom Cruise flying jets for the Navy, was taken way, way too seriously by GenX moviegoers. If you don’t know, Top Gun follows hotshot Navy pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, played by Tom Cruise, who is sent to the elite Fighter Weapons School known as Top Gun to train with the best aviators in the U.S. Navy. Maverick is reckless and arrogant. Is he really as good as he says he is, or is his ego writing checks his body can’t cash? Ultimately he must overcome his own struggles and hardships to become the best of the best.

Yes, this movie about Top Gun flight school, which is real by the way, inspired droves of people in GenX to sign up for the Navy. It has been rumored that there was a 500% increase in enrollment, but that is a myth. In reality, enrollment jumped 8%. That is still a huge jump. Over 10,000 more people signed up for the Navy after this movie came out.

Again, what? The movie is cartoonish. I’m not sure there is anything even real or serious about the movie at all. It’s guys flying airplanes and doing things they would never really do in the military. Flying an F-14 Tomcat upside down and giving a Russian flying a MiG the bird is not good use of tax dollars, dammit! Maverick would have been kicked out of the Navy long ago for insubordination. Many people call the movie propaganda. Adjusted for today’s money, the movie basically made a billion dollars. It also really cleaned house in the rental markets. So everyone in GenX has seen this movie, and they probably saw it when it came out.

This one was a rental for me. It’s a fun movie, but I’m not signing up for the Navy for it. The power of movies is amazing though. Movies inspire us, even if they are cartoonishly silly like Top Gun. The characters are caricatures of people for most of the movie. The story is over-the-top simplistic and ridiculous, and the triumphant ending is all tied up in a bow, no one hurt, Russia is defeated.

Still it inspired droves of young men to sign up for the Navy. Anyway, I feel the need, the need to go on to the next movie on this list.

5. WarGames — Directed by John Badham, 1983

Often cited as one of the most loved GenX movies of all time, WarGames follows the misadventures in computers and national security of David Lightman (Matthew Broderick). David uses his computer to hack into a military computer to get it to play games with him. He starts the game Global Thermal Nuclear War with the computer for fun. What David doesn’t realize is that the computer, named Joshua, is actually a military defense computer in control of NORAD. The computer thinks the game is real and begins to launch its nuclear weapons. It’s a fun movie, end of the world caused by a teenager hacking.

And what did it inspire? Hackers! Yes, there was an explosion in hacking. Up until this time, “hacker” only meant having a deep knowledge of computers. It became a negative term after this movie. Some of the most famous hackers in the world, like Jeff Moss, known as “The Dark Tangent,” cited it as one of his inspirations for getting into hacking and cybersecurity. The conference Moss founded is called DEF CON, which is what happens in the movie WarGames. The conference started in 1993 and is actually named after what happens in the movie. So the movie inspired many, many hackers.

An even crazier sidenote is that a few weeks after Ronald Reagan saw the movie, he asked his Joint Chiefs of Staff if something like what happened in WarGames could really happen, and the generals told him yes. He would later order NSDD-145, a presidential directive that changed government cybersecurity. Wild, eh?

So yeah, it seems like WarGames is a ridiculous movie, and it was. It was fun but pretty far-fetched that someone could start World War III by playing a video game online. On the other hand, it inspired droves of hackers to really go out and try to do these things. They did hack governments, banks, and many other secure facilities. I don’t know. I love WarGames. I know much of GenX does, but it may have created hacker culture. Does that mean we have to blame WarGames for phishing emails and the Nigerian Prince who promises to send me money? I don’t know!

6. Saturday Night Fever — Directed by John Badham, 1977

This movie might be the most devastating of all movies of that era. Honestly, I do not know how we survived. Saturday Night Fever was a look at the evil subculture of 70s New York disco. It stars John Travolta as Tony Manero. Manero lives on the mean streets but he can dance in a white leisure suit. Yes, dancing. Dancing on the mean streets. Oh and the terror of the style of dress in this movie coming back for even a minute. It’s a world of bell bottoms and ridiculously tight pants, and oh the humanity. I don’t even know what to say about the horrors this movie inspired.

Of course it was a smash hit and put Travolta on the map. He was nominated for his performance. But the damage that this movie wreaked on the country is immeasurable. First, the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” topped the charts for 24 consecutive weeks. Disco, a small underground subculture, exploded in popularity. Everyday moms and dads were now going to discos. For the love of god, make it stop. Then dance TV was basically invented in response to this film. People were now dancing disco on TV. There is not enough emergency eye scrub in all the world.

Unbelievably, people started dressing like people in the movie. They were wearing polyester suits and platform shoes to work. Men were leaving their shirts open and wearing jewelry around their necks like in the movie, and this style lasted over 10 years. Yes, children like me had to tell their mothers and fathers that they could not dress like that in public. Oh the pain and anguish of it all. In fashion, the disco-inspired decade is also known as the “Lost Decade of fashion.” It chills me to think of it.

The oldest Gen Xers at the time the movie came out were only about 10 years old. So we were forced to take this movie seriously. I’m not going to say too seriously because there was a disco tragedy sweeping the nation and it had to be stopped. This, like so many other hardships, was inflicted upon GenX by Boomers. Go ahead. If you are brave enough, and you inflicted disco devastation on your juniors or children, be brave and admit it in the comments.

7. Wall Street — Directed by Oliver Stone, 1987

The GenX Wolf of Wall Street. Wall Street was a story about a young stockbroker named Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) who begins working for tycoon Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). Gekko is a ruthless money maker and corporate raider. Fox has some inside information about an airline, and he feeds it to Gekko, who works to dismantle the company because he can make more money from its parts. Wall Street was really one of the first movies to look at the greed of Wall Street in an honest way.

People in the 80s understood the corruption, but they didn’t understand the full extent of what was happening behind closed doors with some of the richest people in the world. Wall Street was meant to be a cautionary tale about how to avoid being tied up in corruption and greed. It inspired the opposite.

Instead of young GenX men looking at the rich Gordon Gekko (for whom Michael Douglas won an Academy Award) and seeing the obvious pitfalls for the soul, they idolized him. In the movie, Gekko gives a speech where he says “Greed is good.” He is serious in the movie, but it’s meant to be ironic. Ivan Boesky had given a similar speech at a UC Berkeley commencement, so the culture was already real and very much there. The movie just highlighted it and inspired thousands of young men to become stockbrokers. There was an explosion of greed, basically. Even some historians point to this moment in the movie as a moment in history that solidified the acceptance that Wall Street was predicated on greed and corruption. Not just greed. Not just insider trading and cheating and lying, and the very idea that being rich made it all okay.

More than any other, this movie inspired GenX to accept that this is the way it is, or to pursue the advantage no matter what. It truly gave credibility to ideals that were diabolical to generations before.

8. Rocky — Directed by John G. Avildsen, 1976

Yeah, you know where this is going. Rocky was a 1976 movie about boxer Rocky Balboa, who is a no-name, kind of washed-up fighter from Philadelphia. The World Heavyweight Champion Apollo Creed decided to fight him in Philadelphia to mark the Bicentennial. It’s meant to be a showman’s match because Apollo has basically beaten everyone else. Well, Rocky goes the distance and gives Apollo the best fight of his life but does not win.

Yes, yes, yes, GenX took this movie and all the movies after it way too seriously. There aren’t real hard numbers to back this up because little boxing gyms all over American don’t keep really great records of this stuff, but every time a Rocky movie would come out, thousands of young men would show up the next day wanting to become boxers. Yes, this did happen. Lots of gym owners have come forward and said yeah, we get kids in here for sign-ups every time a new Rocky movie comes out.

I can tell you firsthand that one of the first fights I was ever almost in was inspired by Rocky. I went to my school to play on the playground with some friends. Really, I went to my friend Jim’s house, and he only lived a block from there, and we went to swing on the swings and fall on asphalt like all GenXers back then.

A kid, we will call Gabe, came up to the outside of the fence and started taunting us. I was pretty little back then, hadn’t gotten my growth spurt yet, and he started targeting me. When I finally said “What?” he told me he wanted to kick my ass. I didn’t want my ass kicked and said no thank you. He kept arguing with me through the fence. Luckily there weren’t any close breaks in the fence, but he did the “Yo, Adrian” voice of Rocky, and I immediately knew that this whole bully fight thing was inspired by one of the Rockys. It was probably Rocky III. All bad Rocky things sprung from Rocky III, if you ask me, but hey, what did I know. After him shadow boxing on the other side of the fence, I just slowly backed away and then ran as fast as I could like 8 blocks home. He watched the movie, but alas did not put in the training of the Rocky run like I had. Some people got the fast hands and some people took the lessons of long distance endurance. Not a bad thing. Don’t judge me.

9. Dead Poets Society — Directed by Peter Weir, 1989

Dead Poets Society was the story of English teacher John Keating (Robin Williams), who begins teaching at the elite, conservative Welton Academy and inspires his students to embrace poetry, free thinking, and the philosophy of carpe diem, or “seize the day.” The phrase was little known before the movie, but man did it rocket into the stratosphere after the film’s release. Yes, carpe diem was on every teacher’s poster and in lessons and on the front signs of schools. My school put it on their front sign. Seize the day. Really? It’s high school. I’m just surviving, dude.

Anyway, this movie inspired countless Gen Xers to become teachers in the hopes of finding fresh minds to inspire, but they found ever more challenging classrooms instead. Carpe diem kind of became the rallying cry for a generation without any real rebellion. We were rebelling against life and Boomers and all the things that came before us, but seizing the day was stuck on everything. I remember my 9th grade English teacher telling us about this and telling us to watch the movie. Ugh. He was ruining a perfectly great movie by making it about my high school English class, and I wasn’t about to stand on a desk for this guy.

The movie had a positive influence overall, but for a film about a 1959 private school to sweep the nation and change everyone’s minds about how they should be living their lives seems like a stretch, right? I mean, yes, I will say it again, movies are powerful, but everyone ignored the poetry in this movie, which seems to be part of the point, and just took it as the go-ahead to abandon structure and completely be yourself. This is great if you don’t have to conform to school or do anything productive. Just seize the day. If I seized the day today I wouldn’t be at work, I’d be at the beach. Anyway, many people cite this movie as inspiring them to become teachers, writers, and artists. That’s a good thing, but we did take this movie way too seriously. RIP Robin Williams, you were the best.

10. The Exorcist — Directed by William Friedkin, 1973

Oh man, yes, it is true that they had nurses and EMS at the theaters when this movie was shown. Yes, people did faint and freak out and run out of the theaters. I mean, it is often cited as the scariest movie of all time, so yeah, I don’t think that’s taking it too seriously. It just freaked people out.

If you haven’t seen it, The Exorcist is about 12-year-old Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair), who becomes possessed by a demon and has to be exorcised by a priest. The movie was bonkers scary and it’s just too much for some people to watch. The real problem with this movie is that its influence grew over time.

Even though it came out in 1973, its reach could be felt for years. Yes, the movie will make you crap your pants, but it also codified the child possession subgenre, and worse than that, it was what you would call a “cultural accelerant” of the Satanic Panic movement. Oh lord, help us. If you don’t know, the Satanic Panic movement started in 1976 and ran until 1994. That hellfire, however, started smoldering in the early 1970s. The movement was an evangelical moral hysteria that swept the U.S., UK, Australia, and Canada. It was a terrible mix of Christian fundamentalism, fear, and media sensationalism. If you played Dungeons and Dragons, the devil was going to get you. If you listened to heavy metal music, you were going to be possessed. The pain of this movement. Its peak was really around 1983 to 1994.

The Exorcist was often cited by the Satanic Panic movement as a reason for children to be exorcised, and there were many child deaths while performing this ritual. Families were destroyed, careers ruined, people’s lives shattered. Fear basically drove some people to madness. That’s the best way to put it. They were afraid of the devil. They were afraid Satan was going to take over their lives and their families, and their fear became so great they destroyed themselves.

I know I joke in these articles. I’m not blaming The Exorcist directly for this movement, but the power of this movie did fuel many people’s fears. GenX often laughs off the Satanic Panic movement, but when you really dig into it, you see that it was horrific. Yes, children died. Yes, it destroyed lives, and yes, many people cited this movie as a justification and cautionary tale. A movie, even one as serious as The Exorcist was taken way too seriously.

Roll Credits

Anyway, on that light and fun note, I’ll end this article. Yes, we took some movies too seriously, blah blah. You can’t blame us, it was crazy times. The 70s and 80s were unbelievably turbulent when you actually think back. Don’t get me wrong, I loved growing up in the 1980s. Great music, lots of freedom, drinking from a garden hose. Yep, all great. But we also had the crack epidemic, high rates of abductions, serial killers were apparently all over the place, and tomorrow the world might end in nuclear destruction. But hey, what did we have to complain about?

Movies are powerful, even silly 80s movies where a guy does an illegal crane kick to the face to win a tournament where I’m not even sure you’re allowed to hit in the face. And man, I practiced my kick every day, though I was never brave enough to stand on one leg in front of someone who was about to punch me in the face. I would have joined a boxing gym after watching Rocky III at my sister’s house if there had been one in our little town. I was afraid of the water and terrified of leisure suits. My dad wore one to my sister’s wedding. I have pictures. Oh, the shame. Anyway, yes, movies are powerful for generations. Does it chill you a little bit to think that the sometimes unhinged minds of the Boomers basically made the movies that defined GenX? It keeps me up at night a little, if I’m honest. Anyway, thinking of the hysteria and havoc some of these movies caused gives me great comfort for some reason. It’s like validated nostalgia. We weren’t just bananas for The Karate Kid, Top Gun, Rocky, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. We actually wanted to be these things, be these characters, and live these lives.

What do you think? Did you see any movies in your childhood that you took way, way too seriously? Let me know in the comments. I can’t tell you how much I love reading what you guys come up with.

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