11 Reasons Why Childhood Wouldn’t Have Been the Same Without John Hughes

For anyone born in the last three decades of the last millennium, there was one authorial voice that helped define the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of childhood and high school. That man was writer and director John Hughes. Throughout his career, Hughes has crafted several stories and characters that embody the archetypes of early life like few others before or since. Though Hughes’ films are steeped in the visual trappings of the eighties and nineties — the language, the fashion, and the hair is very much “of its time” — the characters living in Hughes’ world speak to a universal array of emotions felt by all young people, no matter what generation we were born into. Hughes is the cinematic voice of children and teens, and here are eleven reasons that the director shaped the childhood of nearly every American kid born in the last forty years.

11. The Great Outdoors

The 1988 comedy starred Dan Aykroyd and John Candy as a smooth-talking moron and a family-oriented dummy, respectively. The comedic icons played semi-estranged brothers who find themselves and their entire families staying at a lodge for the summer. Hughes, who wrote the screenplay, imbued the film with tons of teen drama (including an obligatory summer romance), while still capturing in the younger children the naive weirdness that pervades childhood. (Just take a second look at Aykroyd’s twin girls for proof of that one.)

10. Uncle Buck

While the majority of the John Candy-led comedy is about Buck himself trying to grow up, Hughes’ screenplay also maturely examines the hostility that can erupt between teens and parents. Where most movies cast their teens as irrational tantrum throwers, the film’s oldest daughter is a conflicted, human character who’s struggling to find her own path in suburban tedium. Also, pitch perfect performances from a young Macaulay Culkin and Gabby Hoffman beautifully embody the thrill of being watched by that odd half-adult relative who you just know is making things up as they go along.

9. Mr. Mom

Every kid on the planet knows the fear and joy of being left in the care of the parent who never quite got the knack for the job. Michael Keaton kicks serious butt as a recent laid off Dad who’s in over his head when he and his wife swap roles. While the focus of the film is certainly on the transitioning relationship between Keaton and Teri Garr (who also does awesome work), the family’s kids earn several moments of true-to-life comedy and drama alike.

8. Beethoven

You may not know it, but for about fifteen years between 1980 and 1995, John Hughes was extremely prolific. In order to keep his name from being on literally everything (and to hide his more mediocre work), Hughes adopted the pen name Edmond Dantès, the literary hero of Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. As Dantès, Hughes wrote a little film about a lovable pup named Beethoven. Is Beethoven a work of art? Heck no, but if you were pre-puberty in 1993, the odds were solid that you fell in love with the adorable St. Bernard and identified with a pack of kids who just wanted a big, fluffy thing to play with.

7. Weird Science

This one is Hughes’ gift to nerdy boys of every generation. Even before computers were invented, boys throughout history had spent at least a little time wondering what might happen if they could create their very own lady. That’s the premise of this wish fulfillment fantasy in which Anthony Michael Hall and his pal create a super hot chick who teaches them to come out of their shell and be popular and get ladies. You know, everything that matters in life. Also, Robert Downey, Jr. is there playing a real douche.

6. Home Alone

No one tapped into the psyche of an eight-year-old with quite the precision of John Hughes. That skill was never more on point than in Home Alone (which still totally holds up, by the way). The film finds spoiled brat Kevin McCallister left at home when his parents jet off to Paris for Christmas. Hughes’ script requires a lot of its pint-sized lead, Macaulay Culkin, but the kid delivers, simultaneously learning something about personal responsibility while never once sacrificing the ebullience of childhood.

5. Pretty in Pink

If Weird Science was one for the boys, then Pretty in Pink is John Hughes ode to the hardships of growing up as a teenage girl. Hughes’ frequent collaborator Molly Ringwald plays a poor young girl who’s in love with the sad, rich boy. These days, the whole “your real true love is right in front of you” plot line might feel a bit hackneyed, but when Hughes put Ringwald in that super eighties pink dress, it was cutting edge teen cinema.

4. National Lampoon’s Vacation

In Hughes’ hilarious screenplay, you can almost feel the heat of the sun beating down through the windows of the dusty, aging station wagon as the Griswalds make their way toward a doomed rendezvous with a failing amusement park. Sure, Chevy Chase takes most of the attention, but Griswald kids Rusty and Audrey are the perfect teenagers who just wish they could be anywhere but on a long, boring road trip with their family. We’ve all been there.

3. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Here’s a big secret to John Hughes’ success. He never forgot that every teenager every where wants one thing: to be heard. As kids, the adults around us tend to dismiss most of what we do with a kind of condescending benevolence. It can be a little infuriating. Enter Ferris Bueller, the kid everyone wants to be. Why? Because when Ferris talks, people listen. And even better, people love what Ferris says. Therein lies the quintessential appeal of Hughes’ story of the best day of hooky ever. Ferris Bueller is charming enough to do what he wants and say what he wants even as a kid. He’s the kid we all want to be.

2. Sixteen Candles

Straight up, no one marries the acidic hostility and simmering insecurity of the teenage experience like Molly Ringwald. Hughes’ directorial debut tells the story of an average teenage girl whose parents have forgotten her sixteenth birthday. This act of mild negligence combines with her older sister’s wedding (and a huge house party) to create a suburban adventure that — while wacky, and a teensy bit racist — is still something to which any average suburban kid can relate.

1. The Breakfast Club

Is The Breakfast Club overwritten, underdeveloped, and super melodramatic? Yes. But guess what, so is being a teenager. The story of a bunch of teenage archetypes thrown together to hash it out over a Saturday in detention is, hands down, the best movie about being a teenager ever made (and I will fight you on that). Sure, the movie itself is imperfect (did Judd Nelson really need to hook up with Molly Ringwald?), but the emotions within and the characters built exquisitely capture the chaotic maelstrom of teenage life.