Buffy the Vampire Slayer is dead on. High school kids are monsters.
But seriously, the “popular kids” thing is way overblown. In a school of a thousand or two kids, a clique of half a dozen “popular” kids (or even twenty or thirty), isn’t going to be a significant factor for most people. In a school of a couple of hundred, perhaps…
hah No! I didn’t even remember that scene, and had to go look it up. Fast Times (the movie) did manage to capture some funny details of the time. Mr. Hand (a classic teacher-type name, a classic persona) passes out freshly dittoed tests to the class. What does everyone casually do, in unison? Sniffs them.
The mall and fast-food jobs and the hideous uniforms were classic. The way everyone was fumbling along, with “experts” at sex or coolness giving ridiculous advice to the more obviously clueless was classic. I, too, spent time excessively grooming and giving other girls awful advice.
I went to two very different high schools. One was a small American school in Europe, with very relaxed rules and a lot of real characters. Cliques peacefully coexisted and overlapped. My other high school was huge, in a surfer/suburban/mall kind of city. I liked floating among cliques, and I guess my main ones were smart girl/cute girl. I didn’t really fit in anywhere, though. Like most kids.
Me too. I’m with MEBuckner.
There are generally popular kids though. I was dragooned into videotaping many of my niece’s high school musical and play performances. She was definitely popular judging by the audience reaction, as were a few other kids. Either that, or she was just popular with the most noisy kids.
It was surprising and encouraging that the most popular kid was an openly gay black guy, indicating that the world is, in fact, becoming a better place.
I’m not sure it works that way either. There were only fifty kids in my class in high school, and I think that tended to level popularity rather than exaggerate it. There was a limit to how much kids could separate from each other.
Yep, Freaks and Geeks nailed it.
The pilot felt exactly like the first day of the school season.
I’ve been teaching high school since the mid-80’s and I pretty much have to agree with Argent Towers. I’ve yet to see any movie or TV show set in a high school that was remotely realistic; the worst offenders are typically the ones that are “based on a true story.” I’ve taught in a couple different states and in several different high schools.
The truth is, you’ve forgotten all but the really worst moments and really best moments of your high school days if you graduated more than a couple years ago. Most of your school days were routine. Even though you may think you got beat up, bullied, and humiliated every day of your life, you didn’t. You just remember a melange of the times you did. Ditto if you think every day of your life was basking in fawning admiration because you were the coolest and/or smartest.
Those shows and movies take those memorable moments and paint a picture of school life as being like that every minute of every day.
I know what I am talking about. I teach in a school that has huge problems with poverty, drug abuse, crime, illiteracy, etc. and most of *our *days are quietly routine. Yours was no different.
I just started watching it again on Hulu and it totally stands up. (Funny, now that I’m a mom I really feel for Angela’s mom.) The awkwardness, the embarrassment, the wanting to be yourself but being afraid to, the wanting to be grown-up but wanting your parents love and support, etc. It’s really spot-on.
You mean boredom punctuated by awkwardness? It would have to be produced by Larry David.
Heh, I saw kids get shoved into lockers. I saw wedgies. I saw big fights with lots of kids around, even kids on the outside jumping in and kicking the weaker combatant from the sidelines.
Speaking of lockerrooms; was tossing a naked boy out of the lockerroom and locking the door behind him ever a common prank? It seems pretty common in TV shows or films set in HS. Nobody ever showerd or got naked after gym at my HS (I’m 24), but showering was common when my older brothers went there. Never heard of any pulling that in real life. At least not in high school. Summer camp was different.
I’ve never seen anything that captured my high school years with any degree of accuracy. The closest you could get would be a blend of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Stand and Deliver, only set in an all-boys’ parochial school.
I know. I can’t picture it either, and I lived it.
I came in to say that except for the 90’s fashions, My So-Called Life nailed my HS experience, right down to dying my blunt-cut hair an ungodly shade of red back in 1984. And my still-unrequited crush on MY Jordan Catalano…
There’s Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. I haven’t seen seen it in years, but the HS didn’t strike me as being so ridiculously phony. It even succeeded in giving me a lousy feeling in my stomach.
Another vote here for My So-Called Life.
Most tv/movie high schools have suicides, shootings, huge blow-out keg parties full of impossibly colorful drunk characters, and everyone getting laid except of course some characters who are on a quest to lose their virginity.
MSCL had people up in arms because one kid brought a gun to school without intent to actually use it and it went off in the bathroom, injuring nobody. Or because a poem in the school magazine described a post-coital moment, and parents demanded the writer’s identity be released, which the kids got self-righteously indignant about. And there was an episode where friends are out for an evening and fail to find any actual party/clubbing action, but next day in school, describe it as “we had a time, didn’t we?” and they mean it.
This is how real teenage life is - nothing as exciting as what’s in the movies, but to the kids it’s happening to, it’s serious enough.
Plus bonus points to MSCL for taking the tired cliche plot line of the protagonist ending up with 2 dates to a school dance, and depicting it the way it would REALLY play out.
Also agree w/ Two Many Cats about The River’s Edge.
Happened to me. Athletics rather than PE, but I still got tossed out of the locker room naked. Luckily this was long after school let out, so I managed to re-enter without anybody glimpsing my ivory splendor. 
My high school experience would have made for an incredibly dull film. How many hours can you spend watching someone study and read? I never got beaten up; hardly anybody even knew I existed. And generally, I was fine with that.
I went to junior high in suburban Michigan just a year or so after Paul Feig was attending high school in suburban Michigan. The look is eerily accurate and some of the characters are pretty close - I knew a couple of Kim Kelley clones, both in general attitude and in one case, appearance. That little bit of sexual terrorism in the opening episode? Spot ON.
Now the show didn’t come even close to replicating my experiences in a CA high school in the early 80’s. But junior high in late 70’s Michigan? Very Freaks and Geeks.
I have to go with Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Obviously, they cast women a lot better looking then you’d find in any real high school. But, I identified with a lot of the characters in that movie. It was well researched.
And swirlies. Very popular in Michigan. Also re: Dazed in Confused, male Michigan 7th graders were subject to initiation at the hand of 8th graders. Usually this was one heavy punch, but occasionally escalated to swirly/wedgy territory for the more downtrodden. I avoided my taste by a combination of good-natured humor and lying my ass off. There was a weird “code of honor” about not lying about if you had been “gotten” yet or in punishing the same hapless 7th grader twice - I did not subscribe to such antiquated value systems :).