Movies that you had to grow up with to like

[The Borgified Corpse]

Some movies you either like or you don't. But there are others where it seems to be very much a generational thing. If you grew up watching the movie, you love it. But to all those who don't see it until after they've left childhood, they just don't get the appeal. I've found this especially true of 1980s movies. I grew up in the 1980s but there were a lot of movies that I've missed, yet seem to form much of the childhood of my peers.

Insanely popular 1980s movies that I didn't see until years later and I just don't get:
The Dark Crystal
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
The Goonies
Labyrinth
Willow

I'm tempted to also include the old 1980s Transformers movie on this list. However, I suspect that even its former fans can look at it, however fondly, and concede that it is pretty shitty. No action movie can use "Dare to Be Stupid" during a fight scene and expect anyone to take it seriously.

What are some of your peers' favorites that you just don't see the appeal of?

 

[Brikar99]

Haha "Transformers: The Movie" was the first thing that popped in my head when I read the thread title.

 

[Gepard]

Insanely popular 1980s movies that I didn't see until years later and I just don't get:
The Dark Crystal
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
The Goonies
Labyrinth
Willow

I'll see and raise you A Christmas Story. Classic, famous...none of what I've seen of it seems worth the fuss.

 

[Amaris]

"The Last Starfighter"
"The Ice Pirates"
"The Dark Crystal"
"The Goonies"
"Masters of the Universe"

I love these movies, but my friends don't like them and never saw them until they were older. They think they're all cheesy, and they are, but they're terrific!

J.

 

[Tulin]

I wouldn't say "Labyrinth" is insanely popular. Some say it has not aged well. EIther way, it's all good.

"The Goonies" is BRILLIANT entertainment and if you don't like it, you're probably a boring Gen Y emo turd who twitters and blogs all day.

As for "A Christmas Story" - we started watching it last Christmas to see what all the fuss was about and it was..........really REALLY BAD.

For the life of me, I DO NOT get the love for that movie.

Even just as a movie it is a bad film.

 

[Thespeckledkiwi]

I'm tempted to also include the old 1980s Transformers movie on this list. However, I suspect that even its former fans can look at it, however fondly, and concede that it is pretty shitty. No action movie can use "Dare to Be Stupid" during a fight scene and expect anyone to take it seriously.

Wha?? Better than what Bay put out but seriously, the Dare to be Stupid song is brilliantly done with the Junkion fight. Wreck-Gar rules.

Transformers isn't something you have to grow up really watching since the DVDs are out there.

I would have to say the original Tim Burton Batman would be one. Another is Back to the Future trilogy. Oi. I watched it. While it has aged well...well...I think the really get the brilliance of it you had to grow up in that era. I mean DeLorean?

 

[Gary Mitchell]

"The Ice Pirates"

"Oh no.....Space herpe.

 

[NileQT87]

As a Gen Y person... Well... I guess we got all those Macaulay Culkin, Thora Birch, Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood and Jonathan Taylor Thomas flicks.

Hocus Pocus was my childhood favorite and I was SHOCKED to see that it wasn't well-received initially (parents complained that it was too dark for children), despite it being a Halloween holiday classic now. I was a witch for 4 Halloweens because of that movie. I still love that movie.

Casper is another one that you probably have to be my age to get what the nostalgia is about. Home Alone, The Addams Family and Mrs. Doubtfire were huge. And don't forget about The Babysitters Club movie, Tom & Huck, Now & Then, etc... Those were event movies for kids my age. Robin Williams was a big deal for kids because of Aladdin, Mrs. Doubtfire and even Flubber.

The days when little girls went nuts over JTT and Devon Sawa. LOL. That's truly my generation.

The Titanic tweens were my generation.

Gen Y also seems to like to steal from Gen X. We all grew up with Gen X movies on VHS, so '80s movies are just as nostalgic to '90s kids as they were to '80s kids.

P.S. I HATE A Christmas Story. Gyah.

And of course, my generation has that slight obsession with movies like The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Princess Bride.

 

[Turd Ferguson]

The Monster Squad

I loved that movie when I was a kid and I still think it's okay, but I showed it to my girlfriend and she fell asleep through it

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins.

"In Korea, door handles do not break!"

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

I need to rewatch Hocus Pocus. I enjoyed that one a lot. "Amuck! Amuck! Amuck! Amuck!"

The Nightmare Before Christmas is deserving of every single bit of adulation it gets. It's simply a great musical. (And considering how many other of their movies Disney has whored out to Broadway, I'm surprised that this one hasn't made it out there yet. The songs & structure make it a natural.)

I might have to agree with The Addams Family, Home Alone, & Mrs. Doubtfire. All minor works that simply had major marketing muscle behind them.

Tom & Huck isn't just a generational thing. It's also a gender thing. The girls all went gaga over Jonathan Taylor Thomas. But I don't know any guys who even understood the fascination.

Another totally girl thing was Newsies. This obnoxious musical about turn of the century newspaper boys on strike is what Christian Bale was doing between Empire of the Sun & American Psycho. Hell is being trapped on a charter bus full of Mormon high school girls, all of whom know every single line of this movie (and The Princess Bride) by heart.

As for Casper, I'm sorry, but that movie was disturbing even back then. It wants to be a fluffy family movie but it's too preoccupied with death.

So long as we're talking about kids movies from this era, does anyone else remember Blank Check?

I would have to say the original Tim Burton Batman would be one. Another is Back to the Future trilogy. Oi. I watched it. While it has aged well...well...I think the really get the brilliance of it you had to grow up in that era. I mean DeLorean?

As a Tim Burton movie, Batman is immensely important. And in this current age when damn near every Marvel hero has a movie, it's hard to conceive of how monolithic Batman was back in 1989. Despite the massive box office grosses of The Dark Knight, I suspect that the original Batman will have the longer lasting cultural impact, certainly in terms of the visual iconography of Batman.

I think Back to the Future has held up. It just looks smaller than it used to. Back when these movies first came out, I swear, among my friends & I, they were bigger than Star Wars. Now... they're still good but I'm not sure they're in that top tier of all-time great franchises.

OTOH, if you want to look at an '80s movie that is just as popular today as it was when it first came out, I direct your attention to Ghostbusters! "We came! We saw! We kicked its ass!" "What about the Twinkie?" "Get her!"

I'll see and raise you A Christmas Story. Classic, famous...none of what I've seen of it seems worth the fuss.

I think that movie has less to do with whether you grew up watching it and more with whether or not you grew up in a family like that. I did not, nor did any of my friends. But then, I grew up in an age that was so divorce-happy that no husband that stupid would stay married for very long.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

OTOH, I'm very pleased that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles keeps getting rediscovered by the next generation.

 

[Shazam!]

As a Tim Burton movie, Batman is immensely important. And in this current age when damn near every Marvel hero has a movie, it's hard to conceive of how monolithic Batman was back in 1989. Despite the massive box office grosses of The Dark Knight, I suspect that the original Batman will have the longer lasting cultural impact, certainly in terms of the visual iconography of Batman.

Yes. It's still the best live-action Batman film to date.

 

[Thespeckledkiwi]

Oh! Another one is Space Balls.

But yeah the 90s...Hmmm..

 

[ManOnTheWave]

Murder By Death

 

[Spot's Meow]

A lot of good ones from my generation have already been listed, such as Casper, Hocus Pocus, Tom & Huck, Mrs. Doubtfire, The Babysitter's Club Movie, Home Alone, etc. I'm sure there's others out there like this that were SUCH a big deal when I was a kid but must have been meaningless to people who were adults at the time.

I think that The Princess Bride is one of these generational ones. I didn't see the movie until last year and I thought it was awful. Same with The Goonies.

 

[Islander]

Some movies like Ferris Bullers (or most of John Hughes's work) are made specificaly for a specific generation so it's completely normal to feel this way.

But I really cannot get were you don't get were you think Spaceballs or The Princess Bride are such movies. They're spoofs. I think the confusion comes from the fact that they're actually GOOD spoofs, unlike the "not another spoof movie" crap we get these days.

For the Dark Crystal, you just have to put in perspective that it's not for kids, even if it's all muppets. I actually walked out of the theater crying because I was too scared when I was 7 and never saw half of the movie then. But watching it again as an adult revealed an excelent fantasy/sci-fi story.

 

[Too Much Fun]

Casper is another one that you probably have to be my age to get what the nostalgia is about. Home Alone, The Addams Family and Mrs. Doubtfire were huge. And don't forget about The Babysitters Club movie, Tom & Huck, Now & Then, etc... Those were event movies for kids my age. Robin Williams was a big deal for kids because of Aladdin, Mrs. Doubtfire and even Flubber.

Wow, I got a lovely feeling of nostalgia just reading that. Thanks. Re-watching some of those as an adult, I realized that they're not all bad. The Addams Family movies are fun and clever (especially the second one) and "Mrs. Doubtfire" is all right. I still like "Aladdin" more than most Disney movies, although now I realize that Aladdin and Jasmine are very boring main characters. Iago, Carpet, and The Genie totally own that movie.

Your list reminds me of why I had such a big crush on Christina Ricci in middle school. For awhile I wanted to see every movie she was in, from "Addams Family Values" to "Casper" to "Now and Then". I think "Now and Then" was when I stopped caring because that movie was quite mediocre. It was trying to be like a girl version of "Stand By Me", but it just didn't have memorable characters or story. What stands out about it most to me now is how weird it was to cast Rosie O'Donnell as an grown-up version of Christina Ricci. That was almost as strange as making her Betty Rubble in "The Flintstones".

I think the two movies I now most scratch my head over having a childhood obsession with are "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" and "Batman Forever". I thought they were both amazing when I was 11/12, but watching them years later, I realized that they're both (for the most part) really stupid. "Batman Forever" has some good parts, but there's so much stupidity scattered throughout and what they did to the character of Two-Face is pitiful. The slow-mo bit with Jim Carrey in a tutu in "Ace Ventura" is still brilliant, though.

I liked the second Ninja Turtles movie when it first came out, but just watching parts of it in high school made me think it's one of the worst movies ever. The first one holds up pretty well. I didn't see it until adulthood and I think it's decent. And every time someone mentions "The Goonies" as a bad movie people only like because of childhood nostalgia, I have to point out that I didn't see the movie until I was in my 20s and I absolutely adore it.

 

[The Boy Who Cried Worf]

Well I'll throw in a movie that nobody who isn't running on pure nostalgia can like. Xanadu. My girlfriend and I bought a VHS copy of it. I can see why at the time people thought it was a bad movie and why people today wouldn't know what the hell was going on. But actually watching it is just such a lot of fun. Seeing the Tubes in orange jumpsuits. Reminding you of why every guy my age had a crush on ONJ. The early-techno ELO score. Seeing the guy from the Warriors ruin his career. We both got a huge kick out of it.

 

[Starbreaker]

I don't get the Goonies... at all.