Another vote for Dazed and Confused. Add a little dash of Withnail And I as I left home for college.
Yep, all of this, which is why my vote is for Freaks and Geeks as well.
Yeah, same here. Our hazing lasted just one day, the first day of school. And no paddling. Some had to wear clothes inside out and some oof us had to wear dresses. Really not that big a deal. It seemed as if everyone was just going through the motions. It was banned before my senior year.
But yeah, Dazed and Confused gets my vote. The film is set in the spring of '76, with the juniors coming back as seniors, same as me. Go Class of '77! (I was pretty much Tony without the Abraham Lincoln sex dream.)
And we also drank in the woods. I have to admit the film really got the clothes and cars right. We evn had an older guy like Wooderson who hung around us high school kids and he even drove the same car! 1970 Chevelle SS.
“Okay guys, one more thing, this summer when you’re being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth Of July brouhaha, don’t forget what you’re celebrating, and that’s the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn’t want to pay their taxes.”
“The Outsiders” I was a “greaser” in the late 60’s early 70’s. So yeah, the book was basically my life.
But scholarships and college changed my life. 
I envy you. I love all of Miller’s ski movies. If you lived it you are one lucky guy.
In High School, the bell rang at 2:10, and we were on the chairlift by 2:30.
Lucky indeed.
I grew up in the Chicago area, so the characters and situations in the John Hughes movies (Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, etc) were very close to what I remember in high school. Only difference was that I attended a Catholic high school, with the differences that entailed.
Empire Records
Singles - (music and fashion mostly)
Ditto. The TV show “My So-Called Life” was pretty close, plus a healthy smattering of “Clueless,” “Dazed and Confused,” “Pump up the Volume,” and “Napoleon Dynamite.”
I graduated in 1993.
Clerks Kevin Smith’s first movie from 1994. It wasn’t set in high school, but it pretty much accurately reflects the atmosphere and feel of my teen life. Stuckin in a dead end just wanting to move on with my life. Hell, it still best represents the way I feel.
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Lucas* I also identify with the title character cause we’re both kind of rejects in high school.
Definitely Dazed and Confused (minus the hazing). Dead on as an incoming freshman. And Fast Times got it as a graduating senior.
I’ve never seen “Dazed and Confused” but “Detroit Rock City” is dangerously close for me.
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My grade school years, southeast Missouri, early to mid 1990s: Some people lived “Roseanne”, others lived “Home Improvement”, at least in terms of settings, if not actual people and incidents. My little subdivision was very much in the “Home Improvement” realm, but a number of my friends were “Roseanne”.
Wayne’s World, with bits of Dead Poet’s Society/Scent of a Woman.
As a preteen, I had a little experience with the world depicted in Rich Kids (I spent weekends with my divorced father in Manhattan in the late 70s), and the accuracy of that film is impressive.
I wasn’t actually a teen until '89, but this is my answer as well.
I have to admit there’s a lot of truth to this.
High school was just a job I did, and it’s not even quite a full time job. It was something you tried to do well at so you’d get into a good university. Portrayals of high school students tend to make the high school a much more central part of their lives than it is for most kids. I and everyone I knew showed up when we needed to and got the hell out when the bell rang. Even if you played a sport it wasn’t that huge a commitment. In movies and shows, teens are HIGH SCHOOL students; they’re practically citizens of Oak Valley High. In real life, most teens have other stuff going on; one they get out of OVH at 3:00 they’re off to things they care about - jobs, interest groups, gaming, sports, and the like.
“Freaks and Geeks” is one of the more realistic portrayals I’ve seen (it’s set a bit too early for my high school years to nail fashion, but whatever) but even places more emphasis on high school than a normal person does.
Ditto-the cars, the music, the juke box units at the tables.
The '50s
Surfed into it and followed through. Yep, still. And yep, I was in the movie - Adam Goldberg’s Mike, the weasly neurotic douche. Ah, high school - good times. :smack:
Incidentally, “Stranger Things” captures the look and feel of its time pretty well (1983) in terms of fashion, hobbies, and such, and that’s only a few years before I started high school. The four friends, being in late elementary school, would be about as old as I am.
for me it isn’t that. it’s that movies and TV shows are all written by adults. Many of them have an over-romanticized memory of the way things were when they were in school, and magnify the good parts while minimizing or ignoring the bad parts. They write the characters of children and teenagers as nothing more than sarcastic little adults, and (except maybe for Lord of the Flies) completely gloss over how vicious and cruel kids can be towards each other.
those of us who grew up on the receiving end of that cruelty hate these kinds of movies and TV shows, because they aren’t real to us. they portray what high school would be like if high school was attended by adults. they don’t show the harassment, bullying, abuse, rumor-mongering and just utter shitty behavior which real kids engage in.