Ten More Comedies that Screwed Up GenX

From Tootsie to Overboard

Ok, in my last article “10 Comedies that Screwed Up GenX,” I had all kinds of comments saying, “These aren’t for kids,” even though many were rated PG, “and who would let their kid see an R-rated movie?” Ok, 7 out of 10 of those were PG! This time, there is only 1 R movie on this list, and it was marketed for kids! These were tremendously popular. Yes, kids saw them! Yes, 5-year-olds sat in the same room as their parents, maybe watching, maybe playing with cars. What else were we supposed to do? Play in our bedrooms alone at 9 o’clock at night? No! We wanted the warm glow of the television.

Also, I don’t want anyone coming at me about censorship. I think adults are fine to watch these if they want to, but I would not show them to my 12-year-old. I think they’d be pretty confusing. Some of these also need a note of explanation and should be marked as a time-period piece, you know, like when you go to the BMV and get that special plate for your car that’s breaking all the emission laws. Yes, it’s cool. Yes, it’s even special and historic, but it’s not meant to be today’s standard. Give me my 10-year plate, dammit.

Directly to GenX: I think we’re in this together. I had a Boomer yell at me in the comments of my last post that “they were respectful to others” and some other platitudes about his generation. I had to point out that these movies were made by Boomers, and mostly Boomer parents showed these to GenX kids. So, my fellow GenXers, if you ever wonder why you felt like certain things were accepted back then but aren’t now, here is your documented proof. Yes, the world thought like this. These movies, at least by their popularity and acceptance, show that many taboo ideas of today were widely accepted.

Now, my GenX brothers and sisters, don’t go off all justified in ignorance or obnoxiousness. These movies were made over 30 years ago and we all had plenty of time to change with the times, so it’s on you if you still harbor these beliefs. But with these movies, you can see how time changed around these ideas and our generation. These things were really never funny, I think. People started speaking up, but as kids we didn’t know the difference. I’m not defending or admonishing. I’m just writing this as something to think about.

To that end, I’ve been trying to come up with a thesis for this piece for a couple of weeks. I wanted to talk about comedies that reaffirmed ideas in the ‘80s, ideas that we just accepted. Instead of all that, I’m just going to say these were my experiences with these movies. To me movies are experiences. Where were you when you saw them? Who were you with? How did the movies change you? Did they teach you anything? So I’m not preaching here, I’m just reminding you, maybe through some of my memories and maybe asking what did we all learn from watching these movies as kids?

1. Tootsie (1982) — PG — $177M domestic / $21M budget

The granddaddy of all “hold my beer” movies. Yes, a man has to dress like a woman to show women how hard their lives are. Perfect ‘80s logic. This movie was a smash hit. It made $177 million at the box office. The movie was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won 1. It won Best Supporting Actress for Jessica Lange, which may have been a hint at second thoughts about this movie. Maybe not.

Tootsie is about Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman), who is such a prick of an actor that no one will work with him anymore. He’s not a bad actor, just a terrible person, which tracks, because he decides to dress up as a woman to get a part in a daytime soap opera, calling himself Dorothy Michaels. Dorothy Michaels becomes a massive soap opera star. She’s beloved by women across America because she refuses to be pushed around on set. When the sexist director tells her to say her lines a certain way, she pushes back. When a male co-star tries to kiss her without warning, she shuts it down. She becomes this accidental symbol of women standing up for themselves. See where this is going? Yes, in 1982, only a man in a dress could stand up for himself, I guess.

I remember seeing this movie for the first time with both my parents. My dad was a railroad guy. I would say he was ahead of the times when it came to race and how to treat and honor women, but he was laughing at this movie. My mom, a Southern woman, a strong woman, not someone who got pushed around, a bit angry at the world, was sitting on the couch giving him looks for laughing so hard. She was not taking it as a joke. Now, I was very young, but I do remember her saying something like, “I don’t really think this is all that funny,” to my dad at some point, and I think he toned down the laughing. The only thing that stuck out to me was the fact that Tootsie looked a bit like my mom. My mom was older, 39 when she had me, so she was maybe 46-48 when we were watching this, and she wore glasses, and her hair was a bit like Tootsie’s too. I just thought she was mad that the guy looked like her. I had no idea what the problem was otherwise. On rewatch years later, Tootsie wasn’t anywhere near as tough as my mom, and I don’t think she thought it was funny that a guy had to dress up like a woman to show her how men could be jackasses. She had it tough, and I think she was very justified in that feeling.

2. Smokey and the Bandit (1977) — PG — $126.7M domestic / $4.3M budget

Wow, just wow. Someone suggested Smokey and the Bandit in the comments of my first essay “Comedies that Screwed Up GenX,” and I just thought, well yeah it’s bad, but it’s rated R. It’s NOT. Smokey and the Bandit, the alcohol-smuggling, womanizing, foul-mouthed, racist-sheriff-ranting movie is rated PG. My eyes almost bugged out of my head. I’m just blown away.

So the brother-in-law I always talk about, the one who wanted to go see Porky’s with my sister and wouldn’t let me go with them to the drive-in (still a little miffed), loved Smokey and the Bandit. He had a car just like the Bandit’s car. It was a 1977 Trans Am, with the giant bird on the hood and everything. It was so great. I saw that movie so many times when I was little. I saw it on HBO and regular TV. HBO probably ran it hundreds of times, like all the movies they had in their rotation. I guess they had to make sure you had a chance to watch Smokey and the Bandit before you went to bed. Smokey and the Bandit when you were eating cereal in the morning. Smokey and the freakin’ Bandit when you were just walking through the house to go outside but it was raining so you thought, “Meh, nothing better to do.”

Smokey and the Bandit was a 1977 race-across-the-country movie that starred Burt Reynolds as the Bandit, Sally Field as the runaway bride, Jerry Reed as the Snowman, and Jackie Gleason as Sheriff Buford T. Justice. The Bandit has to haul 400 cases of Coors beer from Texarkana to Atlanta, Georgia in 28 hours. It was illegal at the time because you couldn’t have Coors beer east of the Mississippi River. Crazy, huh? Coors is just like every other domestic beer as far as I can tell, but back then this was a big deal. So much myth grew up around this beer. It did not show up in the east until 1981.

I can clearly remember watching this with my mom and dad. Now, my dad cussed like a sailor when he was working out in his garage. Much like the Christmas Story dad, he could cast powerful spells with his profanity, enough to get my mother to yell from the house to get him to stop. So he was accustomed to cussing, but he didn’t do it in front of me or my mother. That was a no-no. He didn’t want other men to cuss in front of me or my mother either, so I can remember watching Smokey and the Bandit, talking about how great Jackie Gleason was before the movie, and then wincing at Gleason’s very bad language. “Why’s he have to have such a filthy mouth on TV?” It’s one of the reasons I was so shocked that this got a PG rating, because Gleason’s favorite saying in this movie, usually directed at his son, is “Shut your ass!”

The other thing my dad wasn’t crazy about was Gleason’s seemingly open racism toward other characters in this movie. Even when I was like 9 or 10, I could tell that Sheriff Buford T. Justice was not a fan of Black people. There are a few scenes in this movie that I think they play off as jokes, but it’s pretty clear. My mom was from the South. She was not perfect by any means, but she had really had enough of racist, headstrong men who thought they knew everything. She too was not all that happy with this movie, and if I remember correctly she always said she didn’t like it. Gleason is playing a southern lawman and displaying all those characteristics, which, like I said, I think she had had enough of. My grandfather was always a very generous man, and a coal miner in Virginia. He often took in destitute people who had nothing and nowhere else to go. He’d let them stay with his very poor family, and from time to time those people he helped were Black. That would have been in the mid-to-late ‘30s and ‘40s. So my mom always said that you treated people like people.

This doesn’t even touch the fact that Sally Field just jumps in the Bandit’s car while leaving her wedding and then rides across the country with him, running mostly from her fiancé, Buford’s son. The women in this movie serve the plot and nothing else.

So if you sum up this PG movie, you have a criminal racing across the country in a high-speed getaway, running from the law, with a runaway bride being chased by a foul-mouthed, racist southern lawman. Seems like a kids’ show, right?

I can remember riding in the back of my brother-in-law’s car, begging him to go fast and faster, and I was so young he was shouting out numbers and I had no clue what they were. “24 miles an hour, no way!” I think he was going faster than that.

3. Airplane! (1980) — PG — $83.5M domestic / $3.5M budget

So this was also suggested in the comments of my last article and I was also shocked to find out it was rated PG. What? This movie is a banana circus of inappropriate jokes and sexual innuendo. There is racism in it, sexism, and every other ism you can find.

Airplane! is a 1980 spoof disaster movie about a commercial airliner whose crew falls ill and the only man on board who can fly the plane is Ted Striker (Robert Hays), who was badly traumatized in World War II. He has to fly and land the plane safely, but the plot of this movie doesn’t matter. The movie is just a parade of dirty jokes and parody that if you blink you miss it. You could watch it 50 times and see a new joke every time.

I don’t even know where to start with this movie. I still can’t believe it’s PG. I clearly remember watching this at a sleepover with my sister and two of my cousins. They were a bit older and I didn’t get all the jokes, of course. I’m not going back and watching Airplane! for this, so I’m going off memory. The first scene I remember is where two Black men are talking to each other in heavy slang, and someone needs to communicate with them. They call this slang “Jive” in the movie. Mrs. Cleaver (Barbara Billingsley, who actually played June Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver) comes forward and says she can speak to them and proceeds to speak Jive. What? Double eye-poppingly what? Yeah, this didn’t age well at all. So apparently this is how some Black people only knew how to talk? I remember my mother being angry at this movie for more than just this, but she was not having it.

The other scene I remember was when there’s no one flying the plane, so Striker’s girlfriend and flight attendant (Julie Hagerty) has to activate the autopilot. The autopilot is a full-size blow-up man that looks like a pilot with a goofy grin on his face. The autopilot begins deflating, and she has to lean down between his legs to blow up the doll with his nozzle. Did I say that right? Descriptive enough? Yes, she’s giving the blow-up doll a BJ.

I can tell you that the first time I saw this movie I didn’t know what she was doing, and everyone else was dying laughing on the floor in tears, cracking up, and I was completely embarrassed. My older cousins teased me and beat me up enough already. I didn’t need for them to know I didn’t know anything about sex!

I always thought my parents let me watch a dirty movie when I was like 8, but it’s rated PG. I mean, great way to teach kids dirty, prejudiced, and racist jokes. Was that the goal of this movie? I am baffled by the rating on this. Again if adults with full understanding of everything want to watch that is their choice, but kids have no idea what they are seeing in this movie.

4. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) — PG-13 — $70M domestic / $5.8M budget

I don’t want to do this one, really. My sister took me to two movies when I was young. She was much older and had a son younger than me. We saw Transformers, and I don’t want to talk about it (see my commentary on that train wreck here), and we saw Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I don’t know why she took me and my nephew, who was only 6 years old at the time, but she did. Killing time in the mall? I don’t know.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a movie about Ferris (Matthew Broderick), who is at the end of his senior year and decides to skip just one more day. He’s already missed too many, nine times. No worries, though. He committed wire fraud and corrected those grades and absences (must have learned it from WarGames). Anyway, he takes the day off, springs his girlfriend out of school, commandeers his best friend’s dad’s priceless antique Ferrari, and goes to the city for a fun-filled day of hijinks.

FBDO is a great movie. It’s not full of stereotypes or prejudices like some of the other movies on these lists. In fact, I think it’s the best one on this list, but I had just finished my time at a very rough elementary school and was starting middle school, and this movie didn’t give me much hope for how high school was going to go. Though FBDO might present a somewhat realistic view of economics class (”Bueller... Bueller...”), it wasn’t very cheerful or hopeful about any of the things that might happen my senior year. But that isn’t really the complaint. I just don’t want to say it. Making high school look bad? Really? No, the real problem with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is that Ferris, no matter how cool he comes off in the movie, is a dick.

Oh, that hurts to say, but you know it’s true, and I know it’s true. Ferris is like Jake from Sixteen Candles, I think. I mean, would he have passed off Sloane to another guy if he found the love of his life? Maybe not, but his biggest complaint is that his parents bought him an expensive computer instead of a car. We didn’t say “rich people problems” in the ‘80s, but that has to be one if there ever was one. Also, he does pretty much whatever he wants. He drags Cameron and Sloane into his mess. And why is he so mean to his sister? Why is it so OK to hate Jeanie (Jennifer Grey) in this movie? Did you ever wonder that?

So Ferris blows off school, steals (and I mean steals) a priceless car, drives it into the city where he goes to a ball game and an art museum, illegally sings in a parade, while the car is taken for a joyride by the parking attendants. Amazing. What a great guy. He is a smartass know-it-all who gets away with everything, all the way up until he acts like a little baby in front of his mother at the end so his sister will get punished for telling the truth about him. Nice, Ferris. I mean, he seems like a great guy, right? He gets his girlfriend to skip school with him, treats his best friend like a tool, and my favorite is him stopping to introduce himself to two sunbathing women while he’s trying to make it home before his parents. Totally awesome after just telling your girlfriend how much you loved her.

I was not confused by Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when I saw it. Unlike many other ‘80s comedies, I realized at 11 years old that I was not a Ferris. He was cool and everything went his way, and that was not how my pathetic middle school experience was going. I would have loved to be cool or just have things come easy like that, and I really believed that for some kids it did, but not for me.

I don’t think FBDO is a horrible movie or that it had a horrible message like some of the movies on the lists I’m making, but I also don’t think you’d want your kid to have Ferris as a role model.

Also, on a side note, other than raunchy comedies about drinking, drugs, sex, or skipping school, do you know of a single movie that portrays high school (or school of any kind) in a positive light? Let me know in the comments because I can’t think of one.

5. Mr. Mom (1983) — PG — $64M domestic / $5M budget

Oh, I got an idea: let’s have a guy do housework and take care of kids to show people who do housework and take care of kids all day how hard it is. Ugh, what an idea. Michael Keaton, who is a great actor, plays Jack Butler, an out-of-work engineer whose wife just got a high-paying job. Jack decides he will stay home with the kids! Yay! Dad’s home, time to party!

I mean, how difficult could it be for a grown man to take care of a house and be a father to his children? It’s not rocket science, right? In the 1980s, it was completely expected that men were clueless about how to do anything with children or in the home. They worked and sometimes fixed things, but if the kids needed something, you asked Mom. Well, of course Jack is outmatched, having never done any of this, or helped do it, or ever even seen it done, or even lived in the same house, I guess. I mean, ask him to fix dinner and take care of a child and this ‘80s man of the world is suddenly transported to an alien planet. This movie might have exaggerated men’s ability to be an actual dad, or to cook a meal, or any of that, but not really. Oddly, guys just didn’t do those things, to the best of my knowledge, in the ‘80s. My parents were Silent Generation. My dad worked, and my mom had a meal ready when he got home. My mom also cleaned the house so much that she moved the furniture around twice a week. If you went to the bathroom at night you were sure to crack a toe on some piece of furniture that wasn’t there the day before.

I watched this one with both of them too. There were laughs, both of them laughed, but there was some angst from my mother, who thought that my dad should at least know how to cook a meal. He did not. He would come home, eat, and then, to get me out of her hair, he would take me somewhere, to the park or wherever. We spent a lot of time together and I was lucky to have both of them. It is shocking to think, though, that he could disassemble an entire locomotive and put it back together, or build a garage in our backyard, which he did, but he could not cook a meal and had a hard time cleaning things. My uncle was a professional cleaner for a while with a company, and he once cleaned my aunt’s house. My dad was aghast. I remember him saying, “He cleaned that just like a woman!” My dad was just mystified by that being a learnable skill for a guy. He could not clean anything to any standard. I mean, he worked in a grease pit. What did he know?

Anyway, I digress, kind of. I could talk about the scene where Keaton doesn’t know how to change a diaper, or how he chases down and tackles the vacuum cleaner, but really the most shocking thing about Mr. Mom was that it was true. It completely affirmed for me that this is the way it should be. Dad should be working because he had no clue what he was doing. Mom working was OK if she wanted to, but Dad should not be left alone with anything important in our house. If we were on a desert island and he had all the makings of spaghetti, we were doomed.

I will say this too: it brings up a bigger thing about GenX and their dads. I was at a party a couple of months ago and we were all sitting around talking about our dads, and I said my dad was a good dad who was always there for me. I was in a group of about 10 other guys, and this was not their take on their dads. The truth is many GenXers had pretty bad experiences with their dads, not all, but many. Dads worked. Dads made money, and you left Dad alone. That was it. So a movie like Mr. Mom just kind of made that all OK. How could Dad know how to do all those things? Mom had never gotten a good-paying job and left him at home to be a dad and take care of things, right?

6. The Toy (1982) — PG — $47M domestic / $28M budget

Oh boy, what can I say about this movie? I remember watching this with my parents. I think, honestly, my parents were embarrassed by it. I was probably 7, and I really liked Richard Pryor, and he was hanging out with a kid, so it seemed fun and funny.

A millionaire, U.S. Bates (Jackie Gleason), walks into his own department store looking for a toy for his spoiled 8-year-old son, Eric. While they’re browsing, he spots Jack Brown (Richard Pryor) doing slapstick in the toy section, goofing around, being funny. Eric watches him and decides that’s what he wants. Not a bike. Not a game. He wants the Black man. He wants to buy Jack Brown.

Jackie Gleason, one of the most beloved actors in history, who played racist characters in just about every role I saw him in as a kid, buys Richard Pryor and takes him home. Don’t worry, this isn’t like slavery because they put Pryor in a crate and take him home like something you scored at the mall from Kenner.

I don’t even know what I can say about this movie. U.S. Bates only gets his kid one week a year, I think. That was perfectly acceptable with Boomer dads and GenXers. The kid has every toy and every video game, and when he asked for a Black man, his dad said sure.

I remember too much of this movie, including Pryor and the kid dressing in Spider-Man pajamas and having a sleepover. I’ll be honest: I was 7. What I saw was Richard Pryor, who was the funniest guy in America, talking to a kid and telling him about life. I remember specifically them talking about how to be friends and how to talk to girls, and I honestly wished someone would have talked to me like that. So as a kid, I didn’t know. I didn’t see all the things in this movie that were terrible. I’m sure we were watching it on HBO. Keep in mind, no one protested this movie. I think critics panned it, but people didn’t protest or get angry, at least not that I remember.

When I saw it years later it was readily apparent that this was a bad idea. This was not a funny joke. A rich white man owning a Black man wasn’t something anyone should laugh about. They couldn’t make a movie where a Black guy and a white kid could become friends for some other reason? Oh wait, they did, and it was a movie I loved called Amazing Grace and Chuck.

So did anyone think The Toy through? I mean, what am I doing with my life? At like 7 or 8 years old I’m watching this with my parents, who were obviously embarrassed by the movie and not fans. I don’t think we ever talked about it after it was over.

7. Meatballs (1979) — PG — $43M domestic / $1.6M budget

Wait, Meatballs is rated PG? What? I think the MPAA was blind. Out on vacation. What is going on? When I was doing research for this list I was looking for PG movies and ignored Meatballs because I always thought it was rated R.

Meatballs is really the first movie that put kids on screen while sex and sexual innuendo were being thrown around everywhere. It’s about a low-rent summer camp run by Bill Murray. Kids go there instead of the prestigious Mohawk camp. There is no nudity or sex on screen, but it is implied everywhere.

One scene has become notorious. A news reporter is talking to Bill Murray about the camp, and Murray says that to end the summer they bring in hookers from all over the world, give the campers $2,000 and a thermos of coffee, and see how far they can get around the world. The kids at this camp are teens and preteens. Wait, what? He’s saying it sarcastically, but still, if you’re watching this with your kids?

I watched this with my older cousins, who laughed at all the sex jokes I didn’t understand at the time. One scene I do remember was uncomfortable even then. Tripper (Bill Murray) is trying to “land” another counselor, Roxanne (Kate Lynch), all summer. In one scene he chases her around a room and honestly gets very physical with her, like tackling her. What I remember about this scene is that she yells for him to stop more than once, but more than that, it’s the look on her face. There are scenes like this in some movies in the ‘80s where the guy is joking with the girl, but in this one, she doesn’t seem like she is joking. He throws her down and gets on top of her, and I just remember her face at that moment. I remember even my cousins got quiet during this scene.

This was the way guys were supposed to roughhouse with girls who said they didn’t like you? I have a couple of other scenes from this movie in my head, but the look on her face always stuck with me. It’s the way Lynch plays it. She’s not laughing or happy that he’s doing it. She seems scared and angry. Today, you’d go to jail. Murray would not be thought of as charming or charismatic. He would be looked at like a jerk, and if I remember right, at the time and for a while, Murray was thought of that way, or at least I thought so.

I would not watch Meatballs with my kids. It did not age well. It was a ridiculously popular movie, but what were they thinking?

8. Overboard (1987) — PG — $26.7M domestic / $22M budget

I’ve been dying to get to this movie. I watched this with my sister who loved it. I think I was 13, so I wasn’t too young for this one. I fully understood what was going on. I remember we rented it. She was over and we were hanging out. Her son was there, but he was maybe 7 or 8 and wasn’t interested in the movie. We watched it in our parents’ living room. Now, I had five sisters, and this sister was 13 years older than me. I don’t know what was up, but she stayed at our house and I remember watching movies. This one she said she loved and that we just had to rent it. So, Network Video night with my sister and my mom and dad, though I think my dad went and watched sports or something.

Anyway, Overboard is the charming story of Joanna Stayton (Goldie Hawn), a rich socialite who hires Dean Proffitt (Kurt Russell), a carpenter, to build a closet for her on her yacht. She stiffs him on the bill, and later that night falls overboard. Her husband, loving guy that he is (men in the ‘80s were so heroic), Grant Stayton III (Edward Herrmann), sails away without her. He can’t stand her, and honestly, she is a horrible person. Anyway, Joanna washes up on the beach with amnesia. You know, amnesia was so big in the ‘80s. I thought I would have had it two or three times by now. If you hit someone in the head, they forget, and if you hit them in the head again the right way, they remember everything. Funny, huh? But I digress. Joanna falls off the boat. She is left by her husband. The only thing she has on her is the card of the carpenter she didn’t pay. So the police call Dean. He comes to the police station and, in order to get revenge, he tells them she’s his wife, takes her home, and tells her she has four kids (all terrible boys) and that they’ve been married for 13 years. Hilarious, huh? This dude is going to jail for so, so many reasons.

Anyway, I remember watching this movie in kinda a state of horror. Joanna stays with Dean and his horrible children for about two months. In that time, “Annie,” as Dean has renamed her, has got the house running right and the children running right, and has fallen in love with Dean. Wow, huh? Her husband, the wonderful guy that he is, returns for her because he’s not eligible for her money or something, and when Annie sees her butler, played by Roddy McDowall, it all comes back to her. She is angry, but more hurt by the situation, and goes back to her old life, where being in love with Dean has changed her so much she can no longer fit in. What? No police? Dean doesn’t go to prison for what is essentially fraud, rape, and kidnapping? Nope. In the end, she remembers how much she loves him and they both swim to each other, kick the evil old husband off the boat, and live happily ever after with her money. Yay!

This movie boggles my mind. And I was old enough at the time to know that. But my sister loved it. She had been through a really bad divorce and was basically raising two kids on her own. She struggled a lot, and honestly the guys she ended up dating always kind of turned out to be douchebags, so when we watched this movie, even though I was only 13 years old, I could only think: wow, are men so bad that my sister would actually be OK with someone tricking her like this, if she just ended up with someone who cared about her?

Dean was another guy in an ‘80s movie who didn’t know how to be a dad to his kids until a woman came into the picture, and I saw that play out in real life with my niece and nephew.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her I didn’t like the movie. I just laughed and said, “Yeah, it was funny.”

9. Better Off Dead (1985) — PG — $10M domestic / $3M budget

Oh my god, he’s picking on Better Off Dead, one of the most beloved GenX movies ever made. Yes, but please remember this is for fun, and I’m not saying these movies should be burned or banned or anything. I don’t think kids should watch them, and my first experience with this movie was not great.

Let’s make a movie about a suicidal teenager who walks around for the first part of the movie trying to kill himself and no one notices. Lane Meyer (John Cusack) has been dumped by Beth (Amanda Wyss) and tries to kill himself in darkly comedic ways. It’s hilarious watching this teen try to kill himself. See? See when you say it like that it sounds bad, right?

Better Off Dead is an absolute gem of a movie, but it could not be made today. The subject of teen suicide is not funny. Lane tries to kill himself in his car in the garage, but fails. Jumps off a bridge, but fails. And of course is going to set himself on fire with paint primer but ends up going to dinner and blows up the neighbor. I think I should stop explaining the plot to you.

I love this movie, but the first time I watched it I had a reaction to it. This is going to be one of the hardest sections I’ve written for any of these pieces, but again, honesty is my schtick on here. I had a locker partner in the 6th grade. His name was Teddy. I wasn’t a very popular kid. I was doing everything I could to avoid being bullied. I had enough of that at the time. I was assigned a locker with Teddy. The poor kid was even more picked on and beat up than I was. He was a mess coming to school. I still have this picture of him in my head with messed-up hair and a blue coat and a sad face. A month or so into the school year he hung himself with his shoelaces in his closet at home. I didn’t have a locker partner for the rest of the year. I never talked about it to anyone. I was never mean to Teddy, but I wasn’t all that nice either. Looking back, we were probably in the same boat. I remember I did avoid him, and I didn’t want to be his friend, and I still to this day regret it.

So the first time I saw Better Off Dead was around that same time. I was watching with my parents, again I think a free HBO weekend, and I just couldn’t do it. Watching John Cusack try to kill himself, I think it’s where he ties the rope around his neck in the garage and his mom opens the door and he’s just hanging there. That’s the picture I have in my head, but I don’t know for sure. I just went to my room and never talked about it. I don’t think my parents ever even knew that my locker partner had killed himself. Did the school tell them? No one even asked about it. I watched Better Off Dead years later. It is a funny movie, and I try to look at it in a way that says if you don’t laugh you’ll cry. I’m not sure this subject was ever made for laughs, though.

I also just have to mention that the neighbor lady gets a French foreign exchange student, Monique Junot (Diane Franklin), so that her son Ricky will have a girl to date. It’s by far the creepiest thing in the movie.

Again, maybe these movies shouldn’t be watched by kids.

10, Zapped! (1982) — R — $16M domestic / $2M budget

This is the only R-rated movie on this list, but I could not resist putting it on here. This movie was marketed to young kids. I don’t care what you say. I was about 9 years old and I wanted to see this movie so bad. It was Scott Baio from Happy Days and he had superpowers! He was a superhero, dammit. Do you know how few superhero movies were made in the ‘70s and ‘80s? I had to watch the dumb Electric Company’s Spider-Man throwing a cargo net on people. This was Scott Baio and he could move things with his mind.

Zapped! is the story of Barney (Scott Baio), a high school science nerd who accidentally, through a chemical mishap, gets telekinetic powers. Barney’s best friend Peyton (Willie Aames) pushes him to use his powers in more and more questionable ways. Barney is constantly popping open girls’ tops and pulling down guys’ pants, all the way to the Carrie-like crescendo at the prom where he gets revenge on all the students by basically ripping everyone’s clothes off and sending them running into chaos.

Before you argue that this was not made for kids and it has an R rating, blah blah blah, you should know it was originally a PG-rated movie, but after Porky’s did so well they went back and shot more nude scenes and cut them into the movie. Heather Thomas did not want to be nude in the movie, so they used a body double and pasted Thomas’s head on the body. She filed a SAG complaint against them and they had to put a disclaimer at the end of the movie.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, this movie with all its nudity and outrageous situations was 100% marketed to children. I saw this movie when I was 9 or 10 on HBO. I was excited when it was in the HBO guide. I also remember watching this alone. My mom and dad were not there. I don’t know why, but I was watching this movie during the day and my parents were doing something else. I just kept thinking, I wish he would stop taking people’s clothes off and do something cool with these superpowers, which tells you how young I was.

The idea that a guy would get superpowers and his best way to use them was to rip people’s clothes off is just weird. I mean, he rips the clothes off almost every single person at the prom. What? I don’t even know what to say about this, but I saw it when I was 9 years old.

Finish It

So again, I’m not saying any of these movies should be banned or censored. If you are an adult and are so inclined, go ahead and watch them, but when you take a step back, GenX, and you look at these movies, how well they were liked and accepted, how kids were allowed to see them, and think about how utterly taboo they are today, you can almost feel time shifting around you. Like in The Time Machine when the guy turns it on and you can see everything around him aging and rushing past, it feels almost like that.

We saw these as kids. I hear people arguing about issues like these on the internet: it’s not so bad, you’re too sensitive! You want to sit through Zapped! and explain it to your 8-year-old? Go ahead. Does your son or daughter know any other kids who committed suicide this year? Would Better Off Dead be harmless or funny to them? I’m not arguing, I’m just asking questions, and I’ll be honest, this is the first time I’ve really sat down and looked at these movies. I’m more shocked than anyone that I was allowed to watch them so young.

I want to hear your opinions and your experiences with these movies. I want to know how you took them. As I said, some of this is shocking to me, and I want to know if others feel the same way I do? Are you in a completely different boat? Let me know in the comments.

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