I’ve got a joke for you. What happens when a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal walk into their school’s library for Saturday detention? You get The Breakfast Club. Not a very funny one, I guess, but maybe it would have been funnier if the punchline was “The Lunch Bunch”? That was the original title of the movie, but I think, for the sake of legacy and longevity, it was a good change. “The Lunch Bunch” just sounds like a bad spinoff of Our Gang or something.

For those who don’t know, The Breakfast Club is about five teenagers who are forced to attend Saturday detention at their school. At first, they believe they have nothing in common, but over the course of the film, they reveal themselves and discover how similar they really are. They all find common ground in their home lives. Brian (the Brain, Anthony Michael Hall) is under so much pressure to make good grades from his parents that his F in Shop class drives him to consider suicide, and his possession of a flare gun gets him detention. Andrew (the Athlete, Emilio Estevez) is in Wrestling to win the love of his father and gets detention for taping another kid’s butt cheeks together to win the love of his teammates. Allison (the Basket Case, Ally Sheedy) is neglected at home and is a kleptomaniac and compulsive liar. She claims she’s in detention because she has nothing better to do. Claire (the Princess, Molly Ringwald) is caught in the middle of her parents’ constant arguments and is in detention for skipping school to go shopping. John (the Criminal, Judd Nelson) is physically abused by his father and has the cigar burns to prove it. He pulled the fire alarm at school. He’s also the most aggressive with the principal, who is there to keep an eye on them, and eventually gets locked in a closet to be kept separate from the others. Over the course of the day, friendships and romance blossom, but will it last when Monday rolls around?

John Hughes was really in tune with his childhood when he became an adult. His short stories about growing up in Michigan were the basis for his screenplays for National Lampoon’s Vacation and Christmas Vacation. A childhood nightmare inspired his script for Home Alone. His directorial efforts in the 80s were only as good as they were because he was so in tune with high school culture (Sixteen Candles, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). And his love for John Candy, who was basically a really big child, gave us Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Uncle Buck. Unless you’re currently a child, you’ve probably seen at least one of his movies. He knew how to make movies economically, too, which meant significant returns on his work. The Breakfast Club used mostly child actors and was set mostly in a single room, and so it just had a budget of $1 million. It made over $50 million at the Box Office. That’s impressive for anybody.

To explain the impact this film had on pop culture, I have to address the “Brat Pack” (forgive me, Emilio Estevez). The Brat Pack was a group of young actors who collaborated periodically throughout the 80s in coming-of-age dramas. There are many actors who are inconsistently listed as members, including Tom Cruise, Charlie Sheen, James Spader, Robert Downey Jr., Sean Penn, Kiefer Sutherland, Matthew Broderick, Lea Thompson, Jennifer Grey, and John Cusack, but the core members – the ones who are consistently on every version of the list – come from just two movies: St. Elmo’s Fire and The Breakfast Club. The five kids in The Breakfast Club and Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, and Andrew McCarthy make up the core Brat Pack. Their names and faces were everywhere – on the big screen, on the small screen, on posters and magazines. They defined an entire decade of pop culture.

Anyway, back to The Breakfast Club. Is it outdated? Oh, yes. In multiple ways. Is it cheesy? More often than it probably should be. But does it also transport you to a place and time so specific that you could confidently say, “That’s what it was really like back then”? Also, yes. The Breakfast Club is an important piece of film history for how it changed the way films for teenagers were made and marketed, as well as being the 1980s in microcosm.

Bonus Review: The Outsiders

A precursor to the Brat Pack, The Outsiders featured what would eventually be considered an all-star cast. Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise, Ralph Macchio, and C. Thomas Howell make up “the Outsiders” – a group of greasers living in the poor side of Tulsa, Oklahoma in the 60s. Their rival gang, the Socs, are from the rich side and are just waiting to harass to the greasers whenever they have the chance.

Trouble starts when Ponyboy (C. Thomas Howell) and Johnny (Ralph Macchio) walk a couple of Soc girls home (Diane Lane is one of them) from a movie. Their boyfriends show up and threaten a fight, but the girls get them to leave, avoiding a conflict temporarily. In the middle of a rough night, the Socs return to do some damage and nearly drown Ponyboy, but Johnny rescues him by stabbing and killing the Soc pushing his head into a fountain. Ponyboy and Johnny flee with the help of Dallas (Matt Dillon), fearing retribution from police. While away, they hide out in a church, but unfortunately it catches fire with a bunch of children trapped inside. Ponyboy, Johnny and Dallas rescue the children, but Dallas and Johnny are significantly burned and are taken to a hospital. Meanwhile, the greaser-Soc relations are collapsing and tensions are mounting until the threat of a rumble permeates the air.

Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather trilogy, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, Peggy Sue Got Married, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and a whole bunch of flops you can skip) is a filmmaker that demands authenticity, possibly to a fault, and The Outsiders is no different. They filmed on location in Tulsa, and now, a lot of the locations are sites you can visit, including the house that Ponyboy and his brothers lived in. It’s completely unrelated to value of the film, but it’s too interesting a story to not mention: The house that the movie filmed at was bought in 2016 by rapper and The Outsiders mega-fan, Danny Boy O’Connor (the leader of House of Pain, the rap group that did “Jump Around”). It was in a dilapidated state, and so O’Connor used GoFundMe to take donations for a massive renovation project. Some of the donors include Billy Idol and Jack White from The White Stripes (dude gave $30,000). Anyway, O’Connor received a key to the city of Tulsa for efforts on the restoration and turning the house into a museum. That’s the story. A New York rap artist who dated Punky Brewster has a key to the city of Tulsa. Oh, and an honorary diploma from Will Rogers High School, also in Tulsa. It’s bizarre to the point of being funny.

In conclusion, watch The Outsiders. Better yet, read The Outsiders and then watch The Outsiders – The Complete Novel. And if you already have, revisit it. It’s worth it.