A few weeks ago I had the dubious privilege of introducing a girlfriend to John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club. She kept a stiff upper lip until the end credits were rolling. Then she turned to me and said, “you know, I always thought it was a comedy”.

Blame it on the trailer: general vibe falls squarely in the “kids today and their wacky (but still sort of wholesome) hijinks” category, what with the running in the hallways, the rockabilly riff coming up halfway, and all those shots of the leads busting random moves.

In retrospect it’s a little weird that they threw the pot smoking in, but maybe it was the then-compulsory bait for the lowbrow comedy crowd. Why, was “Molly Ringwald holding a lipstick between her tits” an unmentionable asset those days? (Come to think of it, it probably was.)

Strangely enough, there’s no mention whatsoever of the hu-u-u-u-u-uge amount of drama inside.

Marketing divisions all over the world were still to discover the “1980s are the new 1950s” angle, and teenage angst would become a newly profitable genre only later in the decade. Were it made now, the trailer would come with its own built-in LJ community. I guess.

Random wisdom from YouTube commentators: “theres a guy in my language class that looks almost exactly like the jock.”