The only thing like this at my HS (suburban MD, early 90s) was throwing kids in the dumpster behind the convenience store next to the school. The store was just off school property, so of course that’s where we went to hang out and smoke. If a freshman happened to come over and try to hang around, we chucked them into the dumpster; everyone knew this would happen and it could be easily avoided by just not coming near us.
This was my experience as well. There was a lot of talk of Freshman hazing, but so far as I could tell, none of it was real. It was basically just rumours for kids already in HS to scare 8th graders who would enter next year.
I graduated in '89 and went to H.S. in suburban DFW. My freshman year, there was hazing, but it seemed to be limited to certain social groups or activities.
My friend and I walked into the wrong gym the first day of high school. We did what we would normally do, and went up to the top row of bleachers and watched everyone below us while we sat. Down on the floor of the gym, a bunch of kids I knew were being made to race by pushing pennies with their noses around the gym floor by another group of kids I didn’t know. The group running the proceedings would take a break from cheering, look up at my friend and I, notice we were just patiently watching, and would just look away. Much later, we realized we were in the wrong gym, when the coach began telling us that we could have Christmas Break - but Spring Break was his! We were apparently in the soccer team’s gym.
I don’t know why they weren’t interested in hazing the two long-haired metal kids, but they didn’t even want to enter a staring contest. Maybe they were wary of who our friends might be, or maybe they figured out we were in the wrong gym before it entered our addled brains. Either way, they were more than happy to haze the kids who were going to be on the soccer team. I know the marching band did some hazing, too. One kid was Saran Wrapped to the flagpole in front of McDonald’s at lunch time. The football team did some nastier stuff, apparently. But I have no first hand information.
None of the metal/stoner/waver/arty/punk/D-rock(it wasn’t called goth then) people older than me were interested in that sort of thing. That’s good, because I knew people who ended up on America’s Most Wanted before they graduated high school*, and I know a few people who I’m surprised didn’t make an appearance. They did seem pretty interested in whether I had any good drugs or records, and if I knew of anything cool to do. By the time I graduated, I was largely the same way. I have no idea if any hazing was going on by then.
*In fact, as far as I know, they are still on the lam. I have no idea how that ended up.
In the 70’s they really did do initiations like in the movie Dazed and Confused, Rene Zellweger is in the movie squirting Ketchup not “Mustard,” like someone mentioned on here. Athough we had initiations like egg or water balloons thrown, afterwords our Senior Sisters would take us out to eat and then party made up for it.
They also did initiations in the 80’s in Idaho when I was a freshman, I then moved to Portland Oregon that summer and had to go through another round of initiations at Roosevelt High, but luckily people thought I was a Sophomore, I even said I was to get out of a egg in the face and even got to participate! Principles and Teachers really didn’t mind and seemed to encourage;)
It is sad that now days it’s called Hazing and Seniors in College and some High Schoolers, took it too far believing initiations meant a pass to really hurt someone and some kids got hurt really bad or even worse, death, now it’s band in most places.
It’s sad because the initiations made you feel special, I know it made me feel popular because I had more than one Senior who wanted me as their Little Sister, I never forgot that, till this day.
Haven’t seen the film, but I can confirm it was a thing back then. My freshman year was 1977 and it was called initiation, as others have said upthread. It wasn’t organized beyond agreement among a few knuckleheads, and, AFAIK, it wasn’t condoned by anyone in charge of the school, although I imagine some teachers preferred to chuckle and look the other way. I guess that’s the difference between knuckleheads and chuckleheads. 
It was limited to one day on the bus ride home, and all they did was smear lipstick or something on us. Nothing horrible or scarring, although that’s probably because we were on a moving vehicle. Far worse things happened any other day of the year.
Ah! More zombies!
As a high school freshman in the early 90s, my high school had a tradition of hazing freshmen at the first school assembly while the administration looked away. There was ‘harmless’ stuff like putting two blindfolded guys on the each end of a licorice stick after demonstrating the game with an upper classmen boy/girl couple. But seniors hurling hundreds of tennis balls across the gym at the frosh section could hurt (I knew about it in advance so I sat far back). The worst was an unsanctioned stink bomb bottle being thrown into the crowd as we left. It hit my foot, so I stunk for a day and had to buy new shoes.
As for the movie, I couldn’t even get halfway through. I liked Everybody Wants Some!!, but I find it painful to watch most Linklater movies.
I graduated in '76, the same year the movie took place.
I never saw any sort of hazing whatsoever (and I was on the wresting team).
mmm
Some form of one-on-one tug-of-war thing?
Heh. D&C was filmed in Austin TX and the school was Bedichek Middle School, which is about 2 miles from where I grew up. Now I had two distinct HS experiences in the mid 80s, where I started in Department of Defense Dependent Schools in the UK, at a place called Croughton in Northamptonshire - but an American school. Maybe it was because of the military influence, but there was a LOT of hazing. And being hazed actually meant that you mattered to upperclass students. I remember one popular hazing ritual was stuffing kids in trashcans, or getting egged. My sister was egged and it was both shitty (ew, eggs) but just showed that she was a popular person.
In Austin in 1986, there was a lot of threats about being hazed and getting stuffed into lockers during gym class, but I went to school in South Austin where we had gangs right outside of school and a nursery on campus. So hazing might result in the hazer getting his ass kicked by hardcore cholos, or messing with someone who was a parent. Mostly it was by cliques and any clique you belonged to (or aspired to belong) had their own rituals. I hung out with the metal kids, goths, Asian kids, and new wavers (lots of overlap with Asian kids) and it was pretty mellow. There was an Austin tradition of going to the ritzy high schools and beating the shit out of the jocks there because they almost always won sporting contests (except for basketball).
Ah, Texas high school memories…
Before my time, but I’ve heard there was some kind of hazing done to HS freshmen in the 1960s in my home town in SC. Rumor has it that it ended when the schools desegregated because you would have the situation of Black upperclassmen being able to haze white underclassmen.
And in the mid 1960s in SC. . . that just wasn’t gonna fly.
But that’s just anecdotal, no proof, so consider that.
I.was a HS freshman in 1976. Except for two things, D&C was so accurate to my school, while a friend and I were watching it, we could actually name names. This character is Matt, that one is Steve, etc.
The two things were, one, we had NO hazing. I giess we were mellow. I never even saw a fight in four years.
Two, in D&C EVERYONE smoked pot. That’s just not realistic, probably anywhere. The 'Heads just think everyone is like them. I guess it’s self-justification or something. I figure the filmmakers were in the stoner group in HS.