THE BREAKFAST BUNCH

THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1984)
dir: John Hughes

THE BREAKFAST BUNCH
MAD #258, October 1985
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Mort Drucker

Time for me to go into my rant about how much I HATE John Hughes movies. I know, it was the first time a lot of teenagers regularly saw an honest portrayal of themselves, particularly teenage girls in the more “serious” ones. I should also remind everyone, it was an honest portrayal of white suburban privileged teenage kids. And as a child of the 80s, that whole Brat Pack mentality just brings back the whole “everything is awesome” Reagan-era world that (d)evolved into what we're living in today. The late Mike McPadden has called this wave “The Disneyfication of teenage films”, teenage sex comedies of the mid-eighties co-opted and made milder. They are the ones looked at nostalgically by people my age while funnier examples have been forgotten.

Here are the couple panels that were MAD's parody, though. They didn't do the usual five or six pages.

Panels here are taken from the article MAD's Academy Awards for Teenage Films. The captions here pretty much explain Ally Sheedy's role in this movie about high school kids with nothing in common bonding one day in Saturday afternoon detention. Also caricatured are co-stars Emilio Estevez and Molly Ringwald.

When the Ally Sheedy character is made over at the end, implying that it's better to look like everyone else than maintain your individuality, the conformity aspect only reinforces my problem with these movies and how they sum up the eighties as a whole. And furthermore...

...okay, I'll stop now.

Another award category was “Musical Numbers That Suddenly Appear Out of Nowhere”. Isn't that what all musical numbers are?

This was what they were parodying that my generation and millennials look at so fondly.