You had me at teen movie
So, I look at my television schedule and I am happy to see that " Never Been Kissed " is on again. Ah good, I have spent enough time away from this movie to actually like it again. Granted, the whole Jennifer Love Hewitt as the biggest babe out there and her hair flowing in the wind is a bit much but I digress.
It made me realize that teen movies are in a dry spell right now probably because of the oversaturation of comic heroe movies and parodies. But to be fair, everything in film as in music is cyclical and it will come back with a vengeance. And there is always High School Musical...( Damn their Disney songs...)
What makes teen movies so appealing? Well first a little bit of history. The first resemblances of the first teen movie came in the fifties with " Rebel without a Cause" and made a star of James Dean and Natalie Wood. It also made Hollywood execs perk up and take notice at the marketability of teen films.
The teens are after all, the most profitable market ever to exist. They are the most likely to go see a movies endless amounts of times and buy huge amounts of popcorn and candy on the way. These kids became Hollywood's cash cow.
As time progressed, different genres came to fall into teen movies. Teen Scream Movies like Carrie and Halloween in the seventies, Teen High School party films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Get the Girl films like Pretty in Pink which gave rise to The Revenge of the geek. In recent years it can be argued the Comic Book Heroes are another category which could be added to the list. We also have the Geeky Girl gets Guy , and the Sports movies. It also evolved to horror films like the Lost Boys and I know what you did last summer.
In the eighties John Hughes gave out a series of insta classics which gave rise to Teen Stars such as Molly Ringwald and Rob Lowe who had as much a shelf life as a piece of bread on a moist refrigerator... In the nineties with the Advent of the WB ( RIP) teen stars were already made on television and drew larger audiences to watch them on screen.
All of them have something in common : Teen angst. No one understands them , no one gets what they are going through. Waah waah.
So why do grownups secretly watch this dribble which is recycled every single time? Well it's simple. It;'s like that song from Bowling for Soup " High School Never Ends", we are always looking for acceptance and to be part of the " cool group" but getting there is never that simple.
In real life, you have to suck it up and get a job. You don't always get the perfect girl and geeks are well succesful. High school is also the last time where cliques matter so much, and when you think life ends at 18 but it only begins. It is a time for pure fun and there is a certain innocence to that. And then there's the fact that a lot of these " teens" are , in reality our age. They are 23 to 25 and act as such but in high school It's our way of going back to school without all the young ones. So maybe we watch it to find that little bit of ourselves that we lost along the way, or that boy that we dated who looks like the athlete jock or maybe just maybe because it is so brainlessly predictable.
Who knows but high school movies aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
.
It made me realize that teen movies are in a dry spell right now probably because of the oversaturation of comic heroe movies and parodies. But to be fair, everything in film as in music is cyclical and it will come back with a vengeance. And there is always High School Musical...( Damn their Disney songs...)
The teens are after all, the most profitable market ever to exist. They are the most likely to go see a movies endless amounts of times and buy huge amounts of popcorn and candy on the way. These kids became Hollywood's cash cow.
As time progressed, different genres came to fall into teen movies. Teen Scream Movies like Carrie and Halloween in the seventies, Teen High School party films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Get the Girl films like Pretty in Pink which gave rise to The Revenge of the geek. In recent years it can be argued the Comic Book Heroes are another category which could be added to the list. We also have the Geeky Girl gets Guy , and the Sports movies. It also evolved to horror films like the Lost Boys and I know what you did last summer.
In the eighties John Hughes gave out a series of insta classics which gave rise to Teen Stars such as Molly Ringwald and Rob Lowe who had as much a shelf life as a piece of bread on a moist refrigerator... In the nineties with the Advent of the WB ( RIP) teen stars were already made on television and drew larger audiences to watch them on screen.
All of them have something in common : Teen angst. No one understands them , no one gets what they are going through. Waah waah.
So why do grownups secretly watch this dribble which is recycled every single time? Well it's simple. It;'s like that song from Bowling for Soup " High School Never Ends", we are always looking for acceptance and to be part of the " cool group" but getting there is never that simple.
In real life, you have to suck it up and get a job. You don't always get the perfect girl and geeks are well succesful. High school is also the last time where cliques matter so much, and when you think life ends at 18 but it only begins. It is a time for pure fun and there is a certain innocence to that. And then there's the fact that a lot of these " teens" are , in reality our age. They are 23 to 25 and act as such but in high school It's our way of going back to school without all the young ones. So maybe we watch it to find that little bit of ourselves that we lost along the way, or that boy that we dated who looks like the athlete jock or maybe just maybe because it is so brainlessly predictable.
Who knows but high school movies aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
.
