They were? I like Dazed and Confused, but I always felt like it was depicting a time that didn’t exist anymore for teenagers because it didn’t feel real to my teenage self.
Keep in mind that a movie or TV show targeted to a teenage audience is probably going to show teenage characters that resemble the way the viewers want to imagine they are rather than the way they actually are.
See, I think Daria is beloved because it’s fantastic, but I always thought it seemed like a movie written about college students set in a high school. It always felt like every character was written to be 3-4 years older than they were supposed to be.
Absolutely agree about Salute Your Shorts, though. I was roughly of age with the kids in it, and it felt very, very familiar.
American Grafitti was pretty much what I was up to fifteen years later. Driving around and watching the boys drink, fight and show off.,
The middle-class, suburban white kids running wild? Parents totally clueless to what the kids were doing? The hazing of freshman girls? The high school being the jocks’ private fiefdom? Middle school make-out parties? The townie(s) still clinging to high school glory? Booze and pot (but nothing harder) being the norm?
Watching that movie was like looking in a mirror.
I remember that one.
I thought The Wonder Years was realistic for that time and the ages of the characters, once you take into account the story is the filtered memories of Kevin Arnold some 20 years after they occurred.
I also enjoyThat 70s Show. Hanging out with your clique and getting high was a part of teen life then. They lacked some extreme long hairs, though. But I think it stands up considering it’s a sit com, not drama.
Oliver from the Brady Bunch and Ricky Seagull from the Partridge Family jumped some serious shark.
Except for the hazing, that WAS most weekends in 1973-1974. My senior year of high school. I WAS the jock/hippie/motorhead. The hero of the town folk after the Friday night wrestling meet and the life of the party around the firepit on Saturday night. And after high school? Just another farmhand/factory worker until getting behind the wheel of a big truck for five million miles.
I put that in the DVD player every few months when feeling old and nostalgic.
ETA That 70’s Show as well.
“Fast Times at Ridgemont High” seemed pretty spot on, give that the writer went to high school “undercover” for research.
When I first saw “Animal House”, I would have sworn I knew half those guys.
Both, of course, were comedies with much exaggeration for comedic effect but seemed quite authentic once that exaggeration was filtered out.
I completely agree with Lakai. “My So-Called Life” got it right; I think it caught so well how little adults listen to “kids”, even when those kids are young adults with real problems.
I loved that show.
I think it’s interesting to see the divergent reactions here. I thought Dazed and Confused was very strange in how unrealistic it was. I’m 33, so it takes place before I was born, but it seemed bizarre for any era. Also, I know that Kids was based on Harmony Korinne’s own observations/experiences in the early 90s, and I know that sort of thing was happening around me as I grew up, but that level of delinquency has decreased quite a bit in the US since then.
I thought Crooklyn did an excellent job at capturing the gestalt of 1970s black urban childhood.
Over The Edge also got it right IMO.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High captured teens and my era pretty well. The girls were obsessively engaged in self-grooming, everyone acted like experts about everything, the ways they tried to act cool and handle serious problems (in stupid ways) themselves, the brother and sister reluctantly leaning on each other rather than involve parents, the sense that adults didn’t really exist except as annoyances/obstacles lurking around the edges of the teens’ life.
I tried watching this recently with one of my teens, and had to spend so much time explaining dittos, mall jobs, ticket scalping, and a bunch of other old-timey things, that he lost interest.
Say Anything
That’s what I was getting at. For a 70s kid, Dazed and Confused was probably very real. But Grotonian was saying the 90s were like that, which was not my experience at all. The way that practically the whole school mingled at the party was like nothing I ever saw in high school. And hazing was so frowned upon that upperclassmen were threatened with expulsion if they did anything even off school grounds.
That 70s Show got it right. That might as well have been my group of friends on the show. Well, we didn’t smoke quite so much weed, but other than that, it pretty much was my experience as a teen in the 1970s.
I recently watched a few episodes and now that I’m a mom I was surprised to identify with the mom, because when I first watched it I identified with Angela.
I’d say it gets it right for both kids and their parents.
I dunno what to tell ya, I don’t think my veracity is being challenged, but I can assure you I’m not romanticizing or misremembering anything. The hazing wasn’t explained in the movie, but at my high school, we had 4 sororities that were over 50 years old in the 90’s. Public humiliation of the “pledges” was common. (They still exist at my Alma Mater.) We had a tradition of “Breakfast with the Dead” where students of all cliques would meet in a cemetery on Friday mornings in the Spring to drink before school. The Deadheads would blast Grateful Dead music, naturally. I had a toga party before senior year that the police report estimated had 200 kids at it. The prosecutor let me off with a $25 fine for an “Open House Party.” We had fake IDs we ordered out of the back of Guitar Magazine (it was a little kit you stuck a picture in and typed up, the card read “International Identification”) that worked at liquor stores.
Dazed and Confused we were.
Same here (class of 1997)… maybe that reflected some very small town life, but as an AVERAGE experience in the 90s?, I call BS on that.