When we met the “Breakfast Club” it was in 1984. I was not born. I know a few of my friends were not either. However, when I met the “Breakfast Club” it was around the 2000s. I was obsessed with 70s, 80s, 90s movies (“Risky Business,” “Weird Science,” “License to Drive,” “Ferris Bueller,” “Fast Times at Ridgemont…” You get the idea). Those movies were my thing and still are, I own most of them on DVD (I still do the DVD thing).
When I first watched “Breakfast Club” I was astonished… in a good way. Astonished at the fact that a movie as relatable as this was made in the 80s and somehow in the 00s was still relevant. That was the thing about the 80s, every single film has the ability to age so well. It was like John Hughes was way beyond his time, may he rest in peace. Hughes created some of the most memorable films of the past three decades and “Breakfast Club” is amongst the bunch.
In celebrating the 33-year-anniversary of when we first met the gang, I would like to say thank you to Hughes. For bringing these different characters to light and showing us that even though we think we are different – we can be the same as anyone else. You may not think you have anything in common with the normal cheerleader, but you do. Not everyone is how you assume on the surface, people have dark pasts and things they do not show on the surface. We are not all shaped perfectly into a little bow, no matter how hard we want to show that we are.
“Breakfast Club” changed the way cinema looks at regular characters. It was no longer just the cheerleader, just the nerd, just the quiet one – they had pasts. They had a past like normal human beings in real life. They had character development throughout the course of an hour or so the film was on. They had depth. So, thank you “Breakfast Club,” for giving us a matter of hours to relate to these characters. If only they still had Saturday Detention.
"Breakfast Club" will forever be remembered as the film that started it all. Meeting these characters was nothing short of the best thing John Hughes ever did. Maybe we can meet some more memorable characters in Saturday Detention again soon.
