10 Movies that Screwed Up GenX Part 3 or Something

GenX watched these 70s and 80s movies as kids. Rewatching them now is like, “Wait… they put WHAT in a PG movie?”

Ok, I think it’s bonkers that in the 80s so many things were acceptable, but they’re not now. Looking back at these movies is so nostalgic, but they are also a little bit of a shock for me, if I’m honest. They aged like fine milk. A lot of these movies I loved. I don’t want to tear them down, but looking at them this way just shows how much times and people have changed.

Now I’m not arguing to censor these movies! I love these movies, and it even makes me mad that Roger Rabbit got the digital makeover from Disney Plus. Yes, and The Adventures in Babysitting no longer says “Don’t f#$$ with the babysitter,” it says “Don’t fool with the babysitter.” What? What are we doing now? So I don’t agree with that. I don’t want them edited or censored, but these movies are windows into how much of GenX was raised. If you grew up in the 80s you knew these things were acceptable.

The most shocking thing I see over and over is putting sex right next to or around children. This is completely unacceptable in our day and age, but back then it seemed ok. It’s ok to have a sexualized 14-year-old running around on a desert island, or have a 12-year-old in a roundabout way have sex with a grown adult. My brain is screaming right now, what what what? Looking at these movies through adult eyes in 2026 is pretty shocking.

A lot of the movies on this list were mentioned again and again in the comments of my other articles. Animal House, which so many people talked about, is on this list. The movie is rated R. In these articles I’m arguing that GenX saw these as kids. Most of these movies were very popular and many of them, I don’t know anyone who didn’t see them. Some of these movies, it’s questionable why this was the subject matter. Why does there have to be an abortion subplot running in the back of Dirty Dancing? Why in Big does Josh have to sleep with Susan? I don’t know, but we saw them when we were kids, and to be honest I was confused most of the time. The 80s was a confusing time for sure.

Some of these are pretty tame and others are absolutely outrageous. Now if you’re a consenting adult I don’t think there is a problem with watching these. Adult brains, well some adult brains, can process these movies, but not kids. Also, I would say some of these movies had a larger impact than anyone expected. I’m trying to keep these a little shorter, so let’s go.

1. Dirty Dancing (1987) — Dir. Emile Ardolino — PG-13

I had a girlfriend in 8th grade who made me watch this movie every day for like 2 months. I said, “Sure, I like it,” but I wanted to scream, “Oh god, oh no, not again, not again,” but I didn’t.

Dirty Dancing follows 17-year-old Frances “Baby” Hausman (Jennifer Grey), a sheltered young woman vacationing with her family at a Catskills resort in the summer of 1963. She stumbles into the world of the resort’s dance staff and becomes captivated by the charismatic dance instructor Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze). Johnny is in his mid to late 20s as a character. Swayze was actually 35 when he played the part. When Johnny’s regular partner needs emergency surgery to have an abortion, Baby steps in and learns all the routines, and Johnny and Baby fall in love.

It’s a coming-of-age story with a 17-year-old girl falling in love with a 30-something while an abortion subplot runs in the background. The movie is rated PG-13, but I know oh so many people who saw it long before they were 13. Part of this, remember, is that abortions were still illegal in 1963, so they have to have a seedy doctor do this and keep it quiet. Baby’s father is a doctor and has to save the girl from a botched job. So if you want to explain a backroom abortion to your 13-year-old, go ahead and watch it with them.

The scene that every girl loves, or at least all the girls I’ve watched this movie with, and in high school there were many who for one reason or another always wanted to watch this movie with me. Yes, it is a romance, and me being somewhat aware, I never said no. The scene every girl loves, and I never questioned why, was the ending. They put on the big ending dance in front of the entire resort. The routine was going to be canceled, but Johnny comes back to keep the tradition alive, and he walks up to a very sad Jennifer Grey sitting in the corner by her father, and Swayze says, “Nobody puts Baby in the corner.” Like 8 out of the 10 girls I watched this movie with cried when he said it, and then they perform the big number and the magical “lift” she could never master before with him. I always thought she ran off with Johnny at the end. I think it’s a little ambiguous. I haven’t seen this movie in a long time, and I’m not going to watch it again for this article, no thank you, but I always felt the implication was that Johnny and she ran off together. I don’t know.

Either way, if I’m a well-to-do doctor I really wouldn’t want my daughter running off with a guy who just got fired from his dance instructor job and is more than 10 years her senior. Also, when her dad Dr. Houseman finds out that Robbie, the clean-cut guy who everyone likes, actually knocked up Johnny’s partner, he basically gives Swayze permission to date his daughter. Um, no. As a father now, I don’t care how well a late-20-something can dance, I don’t want him dating my 17-year-old daughter.

I will say that every girl I watched this with in high school was extremely starry-eyed after watching this movie, that’s why I never said no. I’m not going to be too hard on Dirty Dancing being that it’s still such a favorite movie of GenX girls, but I was surely traumatized by how many times I had to view this ridiculous movie. It also seemed to teach girls that the bad boy was the good guy, and that was fine with me.

2. National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) — Dir. John Landis — R

The second most mentioned movie in all my comments from the last 2 articles has to be National Lampoon’s Animal House. The movie follows the misadventures of Delta Tau Chi, the rowdiest and most disreputable fraternity at Faber College in 1962, as they wage war against the uptight Dean Vernon Wormer and the snobbish rival fraternity Omega. The movie is a series of sketch comedy scenarios that are ever escalating in chaos, from a Black bar trip to a disastrous toga party to the spectacular ending where they sabotage the town’s homecoming parade.

The movie is filled with hazing and drinking to excess and just plain debauchery. Many people blame this movie for mainstreaming fraternity shenanigans. I had several comments where people said college was almost intolerable because of people trying to emulate this movie. It appealed to the lowest common denominator. I don’t know if you can blame the movie for this, but it certainly sensationalizes those behaviors. Having gone to a fraternity-heavy party school, I know exactly what people are talking about. It was hard to find anyone in college who was actually interested in anything other than being a blockhead and partying. Yes, I enjoyed the parties, but there is something about glorifying ignorance and downplaying intelligence that I just don’t understand from people who are enrolled in college. What’s the point? You’re too tough to learn anything? Ok.

Many scenes in this movie have aged in very complicated and just plain bad ways. The one everyone points to of course is where Pinto (Tom Hulce) is in bed with a passed-out girl with a devil and an angel on his shoulder debating whether he should assault her or not. He ultimately doesn’t, but the whole scene is played for comedy, and it does not address the bigger implications in any way. It almost feels like if Pinto did have sex with her, that would be ok too. It’s a terrible scene that makes it seem like it’s normal for someone to contemplate this behavior.

The movie also handles race horribly. It treats the Black fraternity like a joke, or worse than a joke, and of course there are a bunch of scenes where guys are finding ways to look at naked girls without them knowing.

Now I saw this movie when I was probably 12 years old. It was on HBO I think, and yeah I just sat down and watched it. I think I was confused by some of it, and later I can remember thinking, is that what college is like? I know most of my graduating class kind of expected this experience from college.

Animal House was the gold standard of screwball comedies in the 80s. The movie was a monster hit. On a 3 million dollar budget it turned 141 million in profit. Everyone saw this movie, and yes kids watched it too. Unlike other films I’ve talked about, yes Animal House was mythologized by other kids. It was a rite of passage to watch it, but it was not marketed to kids.

3. The Bad News Bears (1976) — Dir. Michael Ritchie — PG

Yes, a 1970s movie geared toward kids that is full of cussing and a lot of racial slurs. I don’t want to get way into this one. The biggest thing in this movie is that the kids on the team have very foul mouths and there is a bit of kid drinking in this movie too. The movie is a classic underdog sports comedy starring Walter Matthau as Morris Buttermaker, a washed-up, hard-drinking former minor league pitcher who is hired to coach a ragtag Little League baseball team of misfit kids in a Southern California suburb. The team is a collection of misfits, outcasts, and troublemakers who can barely play the game. After some bad losses in the beginning of the season, he recruits 2 stars: Amanda Wurtlitzer, a pitcher who is the daughter of his ex-girlfriend, and Kelly Leak, a teenage delinquent who can really play baseball.

The boys are not kind to girls, Black kids, Jews, or any other race you can think of. Bad News Bears was a little before my time. It was a hit, and it reran all through the 80s, but I believe the only time I watched this movie was on regular TV where much of the cussing and racial slurs were cut out. I do remember the kids drinking a little. This movie is a kids movie from the 70s that is no longer a kids movie today. You don’t want to pop this movie in with your 8-year-olds in the room. One comment I got about this movie was that the kids were watching it on a road trip and the mom had to end the movie and find something else. This is one of those movies where your memories of it will not match up with the reality.

Also, for GenX it was very much a model of what was ok to do and think. These were “kids being kids.” All kids drank beer and said racial slurs, right?

4. The Cannonball Run (1981) — Dir. Hal Needham — PG

I was shocked to find that this movie was PG. Someone told me I should put this in my last article, and I just shrugged it off. When I went and looked, sure enough, made for kids! The movie is a star-studded action comedy based loosely on the real-life outlaw Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, an illegal cross-country road race. Burt Reynolds leads an enormous ensemble cast including Roger Moore, Farrah Fawcett, Dom DeLuise, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Jamie Farr, and many others, all playing various eccentric competitors trying to drive from Connecticut to California as fast as possible while evading police.

The entire movie is madness. It glorifies women as sexy objects and high-speed police chases, and Burt Reynolds, think Smokey and the Bandit. There is so much in this movie. Many racial slurs again, and women are mostly objectified. Adrienne Barbeau and Tara Buckman wear skin-tight silk jumpsuits while driving a Lamborghini. They use their sexuality to get out of tickets. Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. play characters who stay drunk through the entire race while driving and womanizing. Every time a girl is seen or talked to in this movie it’s about sex.

The movie did not age well, and it certainly isn’t for today’s kids. I can remember watching this in the early 80s and not really even having any questions about it. Yep, those guys are drunk. Yep, Burt seems to go off and have sex with every pretty girl, and as I said, a lot of stereotypes and racial slurs. It was all very normalized in the 80s. I guess it was normalized because of movies like this.

Again, if you are an adult and want to give Cannonball Run a try, go ahead. I’ve seen both 1 and 2 about 50 times, but don’t watch them with your kids.

5. Soul Man (1986) — Dir. Steve Miner — PG-13

Wow, was this movie a bad idea. If you haven’t seen Soul Man, and it wasn’t a box office success so many people have not seen it, then you missed out on one of the most awkward movies ever made. It stars C. Thomas Howell as a rich student going to Harvard but his parents won’t pay for it. He finds that if he is Black he can get in on a scholarship, so he takes experimental tanning pills and gets a perm to pass for Black. What? What? WTF? Who came up with this idea?

Of course the movie was sold as a journey in racial learning, but what it really is is a crapshow of racism and ridiculous messages. What this says is that if a white guy experiences racism then people might understand it. If a white person who looks Black sees the racism then it exists? What about everyone who experiences it on a day-to-day basis? They don’t count as people?

I remember catching this movie on HBO. I watched it in shock even back then. It didn’t do great at the theater and was protested, and since C. Thomas Howell has said it was a mistake, I don’t know how they didn’t figure that out in the first place. The scene I have in my head, and I have not watched this movie since the late 80s, is when Howell is in blackface and driving and a cop tails him, basically showing what driving while Black would be like. I remember thinking back then, why don’t they show a real Black kid going through this? It didn’t make sense to me then and makes even less sense now.

The 80s were filled with this kind of pseudo bridge-building that was really just ignorance masquerading as positive lessons.

6. Police Academy (1984) — Dir. Hugh Wilson — R

It’s hard to relate how popular Police Academy was when it came out. It made 149 million on a 4.9 million dollar budget, but it blew up in the rental market and on HBO. It was played again and again. Every kid I knew saw it. It spawned 6 sequels and an animated Saturday morning cartoon. Anytime anything became a Saturday morning cartoon, every kid in the 80s knew about it. You didn’t have to have cable to watch NBC, ABC, or CBS. It was 3 channels, you were a kid, you watched cartoons on Saturday morning, period.

Police Academy, if you don’t already know, is about the misadventures of Mahoney (Steve Guttenberg), a wisecracking slacker who enrolls in the police academy to avoid jail time, joining a misfit crew that includes the towering and gentle Hightower (Bubba Smith), the soft-spoken gun enthusiast Tackleberry (David Graf), the perpetually terrified Fackler (Bruce Mahler), the loud and fearless Jones (Michael Winslow) who can make any sound with his mouth, and many more. They are a set of misfits who have signed up to become police officers. The movie is full of hijinks and of course an adversary trying to wash them all out, Lieutenant Harris (G.W. Bailey).

This movie has every 80s sex and racial gag joke in it you can think of: the big-chested woman, the implied sex, the accidentally-sent-you-to-a-gay-bar full of leather-wearing, biker-looking guys that will trap you and make you dance with them whether you like it or not, and of course whenever Commandant Lassard (George Gaynes) gives a speech there’s a girl under the podium ready to give him a BJ.

To tell you how young I was when I saw this movie with my cousins, I was so confused by the girl being under the podium, and when everyone burst out laughing I just pretended to laugh. No idea what was going on. The guy seemed happy, I guess that’s why it was funny. There is a response to racism in the scene where Hooks runs over Copeland’s feet with a squad car and he calls her a slur. Hightower comes and flips the car over in anger.

I’m going to get flack for saying this, but yes this movie was meant to draw in children. I know it was rated R, but again they created a Saturday morning cartoon modeled on the show because it was so popular with children. They had a kids’ lunchbox that was Police Academy. So yes, everyone saw it, and most people wanted to be able to do what Jones (Michael Winslow) could do with his mouth making sound effects. I was 9 when this movie came out. In elementary school I remember kids trying to make all kinds of noises with their mouths like Jones. It was annoying, but that played against all the peeping tom stuff and everything else. Being a peeping tom in elementary school was a joke. I just thought everyone when they got older tried to look at people through holes drilled in the shower walls. I was like, well that seems to be the thing when you get old, maybe it will grow on me.

7. The Blue Lagoon (1980) — Dir. Randal Kleiser — R

Wait, what? You can get stranded on a desert island and have kids with your cousin? What is going on right now? I was about 8 years old when I watched this with my parents and had the most awkward moments ever during the sex parts and the giving birth parts. Did she even know she was pregnant in the movie? I was like, wait, she’s gonna have a baby, what happened, and why am I watching this?

My mom was locked on this movie though. She loved a good drama and was fascinated by the idea, I guess. She did that thing where if I asked her a question she’d say, “I didn’t hear ya? Whaddya say...” and then snap out of her trance and get mad about answering the questions. “Just let me watch the dang movie.”

Brooke Shields was 14 when she did this movie. I remember Brooke Shields was like a superstar after this movie. Brooke Shields’s story really should blow everyone’s mind. She was in the movie Pretty Baby when she was 12, playing a prostitute. She then became the spokesperson for Calvin Klein jeans, “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins,” at 12 to 14 years old, and the face of a brand selling sex. And this was so common in the 70s. Jodie Foster was 12 as a prostitute in Taxi Driver (1976). Linda Blair was 12 in The Exorcist (1973). Kristy McNichol was in very adult roles all over the place, and of course Nastassja Kinski was 15 when she began her relationship with Roman Polanski and built a career through sexual films featuring teenagers. Everyone acts like these things didn’t happen. They did. This is what Gen Z can’t understand and GenX so often either makes light of or pretends didn’t happen: kids weren’t really treated like kids. We were expected to look after ourselves and walk home alone, do all the things like good little ladies and gentlemen, but we didn’t really get much say in anything.

Now I’m not saying it was all bad. I loved growing up in the 80s. I loved having the freedom, but it was dangerous. I got myself into some situations that were pretty questionable. Do I think kids today could use a little more independence? Yes, absolutely. Do I think they should be exploited on TV for sex or money and then have an entire generation deny it happened later? No, no I don’t. We should acknowledge it and move on. Wow, was that didactic or what? I fell into preachiness. Shoo, I feel a bit queasy. Anyway, not a big Blue Lagoon fan.

8. The Toxic Avenger (1984) — Dir. Michael Herz & Lloyd Kaufman — R

I love the Toxic Avenger. If you read my Substack at all you know I do Movies that Made Me Love Horror Movies, and The Toxic Avenger is one of them. Now the Toxic Avenger wasn’t a big movie when it came out. Created by Troma, a New York indie film company that creates ultra-low-budget B-movies, Toxie made it to theaters in 1984 and few people noticed. It was a little movie, but over the next 5 years the movie circulated at grindhouse midnight showings and slowly gained a cult following. It also made it to the rental markets. When Part 2 released in 1989 it started to become a phenomenon, and by 1991 it even got its own Saturday morning cartoon named Toxic Crusaders.

The Toxic Avenger, if you don’t know, is the story of Melvin, a scrawny janitor who is often bullied and falls into a barrel of toxic waste in a tutu. I can’t explain to you how popular toxic waste was in the 1980s. It was a thing. It was like quicksand and clouds of acid rain, which I could never figure out, but Melvin is reborn as a hideous, large, and super-strong creature, Toxie, and he uses his mop to dispatch bad guys with extreme gore and prejudice.

The Toxic Avenger became a craze. If you think something going viral today is a big deal, those are nothing compared to this. I’m writing another article about 80s crazes, but we called them crazes because everybody had lost their damn minds. I don’t know why, but something would gain momentum and suddenly there was like a run on the merchandise, the movies, the TV shows, the lunchboxes and beach towels, and yes, Toxie had lunchboxes and beach towels. It was huge. It’s hard to explain this to people today, it just doesn’t really happen. Depending on the temperature of the craze, generally people could even become violent, see The Cabbage Patch Christmas. Watch it on TV, talk about it, look like it, and make sure you buy everything with this ugly face on it at the store. Why? No idea.

So the Saturday morning cartoon and all the hype got kids to go to the rental store and beg their parents to rent the movie. Many parents said yes, rented the movie, popped it in the VCR and walked away, which is pretty common for 80s parents. So yay! Mom rented me the Toxic Avenger. I’m so cool!

What did they see when they popped this beautiful low-budget splatterhouse movie into the machine? Attempted rape, naked women, girls half dressed, and the terribly deformed Toxie running around killing people in the most gruesome ways you can think of. Again, I love love love this movie today, but it is in no way for kids. Never ever ever show this movie to your children. If you even have someone with a soft stomach who is easily offended, don’t let them watch this movie.

The scene that is most pointed to in this movie, and really it could be any one of about 100, is early in the film where a group of guys and their girlfriends, egging them on the whole way and cheering them on, are hot-rodding into the city. They have an ongoing game where if they hit people they get points: points for old people, walkers, kids. They pass a boy on a bike. They turn around and hit the kid. This probably 12-year-old starts crawling all bloody back to his bike when they throw it in reverse and run over the kid’s head. His head basically explodes and then the girls get out of the car and take pictures of the mess.

I remember my cousins came over with this movie one night and they popped it in and we watched it. Now I would later rent this with my friends and love it, but at this time I think I was about 10 or 11 and not full-on into horror yet. My mom watched that scene from the doorway of the living room. She looked at me and said, “Do you really want to watch this?” I shrugged and said sure, and she went back into the kitchen. That was as much pushback as I ever got about watching violence on TV. I really didn’t want to watch it, but I wasn’t going to tell my older cousins that.

Anyway, this movie is a ridiculously over-the-top B-horror movie from a splatterhouse production company that is known for this kind of filmmaking. As an adult I can appreciate the movie, but never would I ever let young children watch this, and I wouldn’t have bought them lunchboxes and beach towels and made a Saturday morning cartoon out of it. WTF.

9. Big (1988) — Dir. Penny Marshall — PG

I resisted putting Big on this list because I love this movie, but I have to say, what? What? If you don’t know, Big is the 1988 comedy-drama about 12-year-old Josh Baskin (Tom Hanks) who makes a wish to a fortune-teller machine at a carnival that he would be big. He’s mad at his parents and just wants to be independent. Every 12-year-old kid has this wish at some point in their young lives, and he becomes big. He goes from 12 to a fully grown Tom Hanks at the age of 31. That’s how old Hanks was when he played this part. Josh runs out of his house, finds his way to the city, gets a job at a toy company, and starts living his life. He’s better at life than most of the adults, which makes you wonder about Boomers, right? How is this 12-year-old kid kicking ass and taking names at his job, at living his life, and at dating even? It’s a great premise for a movie. GenX kids understood life better than their Boomer parents. I had to yell at my mom to roll the windows down when she was smoking in the car, so maybe not too far-fetched.

As for the theme of the movie I understand that it seems logical that all of us adults need a little more inner child speaking to us. Hey, don’t take those bills and that crushing rejection at work so seriously, just be a kid. Watch cartoons, jump on a trampoline, hang out with your friends. That’s all fine. It’s a great message.

The problem comes in, and you know where I’m going with this, in the dating. Josh is 12, and he meets Susan Lawrence (Elizabeth Perkins). She is a late 20-something to 30-something professional working at this toy company. Josh is constantly seeing through the dregs of business and corporate BS and is able to predict what real kids would want in toys. Makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is that Susan and Josh start a relationship. They seem to fall in love in about 1 to 2 weeks. In total Josh is only an adult for maybe a month, maybe a little longer, so their relationship goes incredibly fast, and one night Susan, who is very hot for and in pursuit of Josh, goes to a party with him, goes back to his place, they start kissing, fade to black, and they wake up in bed together! What? What? What am I watching? Where did my life go so wrong in the 80s that this movie is telling me that not only are 12-year-olds better at doing life and business than Boomer men, but they are also better in bed? When you say it in words it sounds very wrong, and it is. Again, love this movie, didn’t want to talk about this, but hey, this is what this series is for, right? Should we not point out that the 12-year-old boy is sleeping with the 30-year-old? Should we not question what exactly is going on in 80s movies that they have to find a workaround for adults sleeping with kids?

I remember watching this movie with my mom and my dad. It’s rated PG of course, and it has so many funny and great scenes. Tom Hanks in the 80s was hilarious. The dancing piano scene is great, but I remember when we got to the scene where they slept together my mom said something: “Oh, goodness, they slept together.” She didn’t discuss it any further than that, but now I know what she was thinking. No way my mom could have known they were going to slip that into the movie, and I still don’t know why they did. Why raise the stakes like that? Was that for shock value? There is no need for them to sleep together, Josh is already killing it at life. Shortly after this he goes back to the carnival and changes back into the 12-year-old, waves goodbye to Susan. Susan has to go home and take a shower and rethink her life after this scene, she had to, there was no other option for this character, though all of that is off screen.

What were they thinking? It’s a great movie, why do that?

10. Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) — Dir. Robert Zemeckis — PG

Ok, this would usually go on my trauma list for movies. So many people have pointed to it and said they were screwed up by the eyes in this movie popping out and the reveal that Judge Doom is a toon. Yes, the scene is very disturbing for children. There is also the cute little shoe dip, where Doom puts the shoe in the Dip and the poor little thing reacts in horror and dies.

Ok, let’s be honest with this movie for a minute. Ms. “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way,” aka Jessica Rabbit, was a little much for like 12-year-old boy brains of the 1980s. What is it with kids movies and sex in the 80s? I don’t get it. She could have been half as sexy, voluptuous, and alluring and the movie would have been just as good I think.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a 1988 live-action/animation hybrid set in a 1947 Hollywood where humans and cartoon characters called “toons” coexist. Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) is a private investigator hired to find out if Jessica Rabbit, wife of Roger Rabbit, is cheating on him. Roger becomes the prime suspect when the man she’s suspected of fooling around with turns up dead, and he begs Eddie to clear his name. Best premise for a kids movie ever. Also there is the evil Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd) who is a toon dressed in human skin. He has come up with a Dip to destroy all of Toontown.

Ok, so if you watch this movie you really can’t help but be attracted to Jessica Rabbit. Look, toons are not on my kink list, but yes she is attractive and the way she is animated and played is pure sex. Don’t be judgy, I was young when I saw it, and my reaction was the same as everyone else. Go ahead and lie. I don’t care, but we all know the truth, you were attracted to her too!

It brings me to the car crash scene. Jessica is in a car accident and is thrown spinning out of a taxi and lands on her butt in the grass. Now when I saw the movie I was probably 13, maybe 14. I didn’t go see it at the movies. At 13 I was maturing out of cartoons a bit, so it seemed like a kids movie, but then one of my horror friends insisted we rent it on one of our horror sleepovers. Are you out of your mind, dude? What about Prince of Darkness? We are renting that kids movie over a horror movie? “I heard she’s naked in it,” and he held up the VHS cover and pointed to Jessica on the back. Ok, fine.

So yes, I was one of those young boys who would later find himself sitting in front of a TV rewinding the VCR over and over trying to see if Jessica Rabbit was wearing any panties when she flies out of the car. There were like 3 or 4 of us debating this. I’m pretty sure they disappeared. Josh was skeptical. Jim was like, no way dude. It’s not a moment in movie-watching history that I am proud of, but hey, it was a GenX thing, right? Plus VCRs back then were so crappy with the pause you couldn’t see anything. Get out of the way, fuzzy lines, I’m looking up this cartoon’s dress!

I think many of us, like me, who believe that her panties did disappear have recently been validated with Disney editing the version that is on Disney Plus to make the flinging-her-out-of-the-car scene less provocative. It’s a kids movie, why was it provocative in the first place, and why did you have to change it? HA!

Roll Credits

So there’s my rant on Movies that Screwed Up GenX Part 3, or whatever. I’m running another series now, Movies GenX Took Too Seriously. People seem not to want to kill me over those. Please remember I’m not arguing for censorship on these, especially arguably the worst movie on this list, Toxic Avenger. I love that movie. I just don’t think kids should watch it.

Overall though, the 80s were a pretty weird time. We were all outside unsupervised much of the time, and then when we were inside it wasn’t like people were really paying attention to us all that much. I’m ok with that. Someone said it was worse when your parents were disappointed than when they were angry. Ok, my dad got disappointed, my mom was a screaming, yelling crazy person who was flailing with her arms and legs, so I think I preferred her not paying a lot of attention to what I was doing. I was ok with that, so I don’t want it to sound like the 80s were bad. In so many ways they were glorious, fun, and honestly I think good for us. I do think they should have paid a little more attention to where we were and what we were watching, but hey, no generation is perfect.

I don’t know why Boomers always had to put sex-adjacent content next to children in many of these movies. That’s a question I guess only Boomers and those particular filmmakers can answer. It was a very different time though. They call that the Overton Window, and it shifted greatly from 1985 until 2025, for sure. I think people who did not live at that time, if you took them back in a time machine, would be forever and constantly offended and confused by the norms of 80s culture. If I’m honest, I think it would be kinda hilarious, but maybe that’s the 80s in me talking.

I hope you enjoyed this little series. I don’t know how many more of these Screwed Up GenX pieces I’ll do. Like I said I have other ideas, but if you have suggestions, or just want to yell at me and throw virtual rotten fruit at me in the comments, go ahead. Oh, and I still love hearing personal experiences related to movies, so let ‘em rip.

Related: