Without John Hughes, would there have been a 1980s? The filmmaker and screenwriter died of a heart attack while walking Thursday in Manhattan. For the uninitiated, he wrote National Lampoon’s Vacation, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Weird Science and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off–directing several of those films as well.

Memories of Hughes’s films are as likely to be audio as visual: The Psychedelic Furs, The Smiths, and Simple Minds were among the acts introduced to a wider audience through Hughes’s sonically-savvy films.

No John Hughes, no Molly Ringwald; no Molly Ringwald, no 1980s–it’s pretty simple. But when the 1980s ended, so did John Hughes. He hadn’t directed a movie since 1991, and his work as a screenwriter since his golden age had been spotty. Proof that John Hughes will be missed in death comes from the fact that John Hughes was so missed for the last two decades of his life. The void in high school movies that transcend the high school audience is so enormous in part because John Hughes stopped directing movies. From Justin to Kelly? She’s All That? Dude, Where’s My Car? They don’t make teen films like they used to–at least how John Hughes used to.

“Wax on, wax off.” “He slimed me.” “Fortune and Glory, kid.” “I’ll be back.” “Don’t get him wet. Keep him out of bright light. And never feed him after midnight.”

It’s hard to believe that a quarter century has passed since that magical movie summer of 1984. The calender year of George Orwell’s dire dystopian nightmares had arrived, but instead of a nation writhing in servitude to Big Brother, America was delighting in the prosperity engineered by Big Gipper. Throughout the summer of ‘84, the greatest president of the twentieth century was cruising to the single largest electoral total ever amassed by a presidential candidate in our history, and “It’s Morning Again in America” commercials were playing on TV’s across the land to widespread approval.

In California, a cute little R2-D2 of a machine called the Apple Macintosh had been introduced, heralding the beginnings of a technological tsunami that has yet to abate. Meanwhile, across the world, the latest in the Soviet Union’s grotesque chorus line of cadaverous leaders had croaked, presaging the collapse of the whole miserable works in just a few short years. There was still a world-full of the usual problems, failures, and challenges, yes. But for those of us who spent that summer in gloriously air-conditioned, velvet-dark theaters — and sometimes, when we were lucky, in massive outdoor parking lots flanked by titanic movie screens glowing mystically in the dying light of the setting sun — times were good in America.

There’s much to say about that year from a film perspective, and in the coming months I’m sure those of us at Big Hollywood who had our minds permanently warped by ectoplasmic entities, unstoppable crane kicks, phased-plasma rifles in the forty-watt range, and the dreaded Black Sleep of Kali Ma will be saying it. I’d like to kick things off, however, with a short shout-out to a picture that didn’t rake in blockbuster profits, or fuel a billion-dollar toy industry, or get its characters immortalized on collectible Burger King cups, or spawn an assembly line of sequels and prequels. No, this film penetrated the cultural zeitgeist through an unassuming former editor of National Lampoon, directing his first movie on a shoestring budget, from a script filled with deathless lines like:

“Whatsa happenin’, hot stuff?”

“By night’s end, I predict: me and her will interface.”

“Chronologically, you’re sixteen today. Physically? You’re still fifteen.”

“What the hell are you bitchin’ about? I’ve gotta sleep underneath some Chinaman named after a duck’s dork.”

“I can’t believe my grandmother actually felt me up!”

“I can’t believe I gave my panties to a geek.”

“Sophomore, dude, sophomore! Fully aged sophomore meat.”

“Relax, would you? We have seventy dollars and a pair of girls’ underpants. We’re safe as kittens.”

“No more yankie my wankie! The Donger need food.”

“This information cannot leave this room — it would devastate my reputation as a dude.”

“C’mon, I don’t want to see it!”

“Fresh breath is the priority of my life.”

“I’m kinda like the leader, you know? Kinda like the King of the Dipshits.”

If you got through that list without some serious laughing accompanied by a tinge of bittersweet nostalgia, then in all likelihood you were a criminally sheltered child who was locked in a closet somewhere the day a small movie called Sixteen Candles (1984) debuted in theaters twenty-five years ago. The man who etched “They f***ing forgot my birthday!” into the permanent memory banks of a whole generation of teens was John Hughes, who had cut his comedy teeth writing thousands of jokes on spec, sending them to comedy club veterans like Rodney Dangerfield and Joan Rivers and getting the princely sum of $7 whenever they condescended to buy one. He later weaseled his way onto the staff of Harvard’s National Lampoon, which left him well positioned when Hollywood eventually began looting that talent pool. His scripts for two successful pictures, National Lampoon’s Vacation and Mr. Mom (both 1983) netted him his first chance to direct.

Using a motley assortment of green unknowns, Hughes proceeded to invent an attractive new subgenre, the “teen comedy-drama,” defined by its clever whipsaws between silliness and seriousness until the audience is hard-pressed to decide whether they are supposed to be laughing or crying. And if that sounds like the perfect description of a typical teenager’s emotions, then you’re getting close to figuring out what made Hughes’ films so successful. “I’m not interested in psychotics,” he once said in a New York Times interview, “I’m interested in the person you don’t expect to have a story. I like Mr. Everyman.” In Sixteen Candles, we get not only an Everyman in the form of The Geek (Anthony Michael Hall, who out-auditioned a young Jim Carrey to land the role), but also an Everywoman in Sam, played by Molly Ringwald with the sort of effortless, winning, subdued charisma that would soon become a Hughes trademark. The kids in his films just plain acted better than the ones in other pictures, and it’s hard not to chalk that up to the instincts and human insight of Hughes, a guy who avoided the pitfalls of the Hollyweird lifestyle and stays safely secluded in the Midwest with his wife and kids, living a comparatively normal life.

The film is in many ways the closest thing that my generation has to an American Graffiti (1973). Spandau Ballet’s “True,” playing at the school dance in Candles, has since become a perennial staple on wedding and prom playlists. Little details like the Heather Thomas bikini poster seen briefly on a bedroom door will bring back memories for any man of a certain age. And like Graffiti, Sixteen Candles jump-started the careers of a number of young actors, among the most prominent the brother-sister tandem of John and Joan Cusack. It was hardly a big hit (it ended up only the 44th top-grossing film of 1984), but the budget had been small, and its relative profitability allowed Hughes to continue directing. The films that followed, and that with Sixteen Candles constitute Hughes’ entire output as a director, were The Breakfast Club (1985), Weird Science (1985), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987), She’s Having a Baby (1988), Uncle Buck (1989), and Curly Sue (1991). That last stumbled at the box office in a way that none of the previous ones ever did, after which Hughes abandoned directing and stuck to producing and writing. His notable producing successes include Pretty in Pink (1986) and Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), and by far the most profitable movie of his career in any capacity was the enormously popular Home Alone (1990). By all accounts that film and its sequels left Hughes the Writer and Producer at the very peak of his fame, power, and influence.

And then, without explanation, John Hughes retreated into an inexplicable, baffling virtual retirement, where he remains to this day. No one knows exactly what sent him into seclusion. Perhaps, like so many artists, he had burned himself out with his decade of non-stop production (over twenty scripts flowed from his imagination during those years, not counting all of the directing and producing he was doing). Maybe the death of his close friend John Candy in 1994 sent him into an emotional/artistic tailspin from which he never truly recovered. Maybe age robbed him of the connection he used to feel to teens and their particular fears, hopes, and dreams. Or maybe he sensed that the world had changed, and that films like Sixteen Candles (which was PG, with the barest smattering of obligatory nudity and swearing) were becoming relics in the face of far seamier fare like the American Pie series (1999-present) and non-stop raunch-fests like Superbad (2007).

That last film is as good a benchmark as any to use. Its producer, Judd Apatow, is widely seen in Hollywood circles as the heir to the John Hughes teen mantle. It would be more accurate to say that a movie like Superbad is to Hughes what a wannabe snuff-film like Hostel (2005) is to classic, elegant horror like The Exorcist (1973) or The Shining (1980). Hughes could certainly be fantastically juvenile when looking for that all-important next laugh (Sixteen Candles, in its blasé treatment of Asians and the disabled, is in many ways a time capsule of political incorrectness), but nothing he ever foisted on audiences comes close to the wall-to-wall, one-note crassness and vulgarity of a film like Superbad. The problem with taking the lazy way out — using mere shock value to elicit Pavlovian, knee-jerk laughter — is that next time you always need something just a little more outrageous or cruel or perverse or shocking, until eventually you’ve hit bottom with nowhere else to go. To the hardcore, open-minded filmgoer, the affront isn’t so much moral as artistic — it’s bad storytelling, bad comedy, bad filmmaking. Super-bad, you might say. And the few times that Superbad tries to be clever (see the incongruous jokes the otherwise brain-dead youngsters are able to make about such non-teenybopper cultural touchstones as Orson Welles and Waylon Jennings) it only succeeds in sounding spectacularly phony, just a Hollywood comedy writer’s uninformed view of how teens talk and how much pop culture history they would reasonably know.

I get the feeling that when John Hughes wrote his movies, he had in mind the truth that all teen films eventually become cobwebbed and dated relics of a bygone age. The cool becomes cheese and the style old-fashioned. In the real world, both the stars and the target audience get old and balding and baggy-eyed and wrinkled and gray. When that happens, all that’s left of an old movie is what is universal and timeless. The question becomes: did it truly hit the zeitgeist of a generation, or did it just fake it?

By that criterion, I’m guessing that the Apatow and American Pie films are destined to someday be filed on a dusty back shelf along with mostly forgotten movies like The Last American Virgin (1982) and Private School (1983). Along with the cream of Hughes’ output, the modern teen comedies that I think have the best chance of surviving include House Party (1990), Swingers (1996) and Napoleon Dynamite (2004), all films that earn their laughs with far more than scatology and Tourette syndrome. In any case, no matter how it all shakes out, Sixteen Candles has assured itself a place at the head of the class, by blazing the way toward a more meaningful style of teen comedy that takes the emotions of kids seriously even in those spots when it doesn’t take itself seriously at all.

“I can’t believe this — they f***ing forgot my birthday!”

Well, we here at Big Hollywood didn’t. Happy Birthday, hot stuff. Chronologically you’re twenty-five now, but at the sunswept drive-ins of our imagination you’ll always be sweet sixteen.

The show, which follows the (mis)adventures of a high schooler Amy who hooked up with a classmate at band camp and got preggers as a result, was a mini-hit last year and a mini-scandal. It’s most horrifying depredation to contemporary mores? The memento mori that is a puffy and still-largely talentless Molly “Sixteen Candles” Ringwald, who plays the lead character’s divorced mom. Like a boob-tube Ozymandias, look upon her visage and despair.

Last season revolved around Amy realizing she was in the family way and then having to tell her folks, friends, etc. The father of the still-unborn child was a cad, scamming on several gals, and Amy ended up falling in with Ben, a loveable nerd who promises to raise the bastard as his own. Although abortion was raised as a possibility, it was dispatched more quickly than the theme song from Maude, which may well have been the last prime-time show to feature a lead character who actually went the Planned Parenthood route. What was stressed again and again throughout The Secret Life to the point of tedium was that Amy did not have sex on a regular basis. Or even more than that one unfortunate moment in band camp. Nor did virtually any of the other kids (and apparently, Molly Ringwald’s character either).

In Season Two’s opener, Ben and Amy plan a secret wedding and they actually get hitched. During the course of the show, the bride and groom and their best man and bridesmaid need to get fake I.D.s so the ceremony can take place absent any parental input. Various classmates also get fake I.D.s so they can attend the reception, which was as dry as a Methodist’s liquor cabinet. Indeed, a running theme throughout the episode is how no one will drink alcohol at all, but especially if they have to drive anywhere. By the time the credits ran, I was looking to see if Carrie A. Nation was the script consultant.

Which is to say that apart from the vaguely titallating premise and promise of the show’s title, the thing is safe as milk. Skim milk. Soy milk. Possibly powdered milk. The Secret Life, arguably Hollywood’s most naked bid at the jailbait market since Saved By The Bell went into permanent summer recess sometime before Dustin Diamond entered a long-delayed puberty, thus exemplifies the worst tradition of after-school special.

It’s preachy beyond belief and, for all the bad stuff that’s supposed to happen to the characters, it plays out in a world that is about as menacing and gritty as the dancing gangs in West Side Story. Give me Rock and Roll High School any day, the 1979 flick that ends with the blowing up of Vince Lombardi High, as great a Sophoclean catharsis as has been recorded in a movie featuring Clint Howard.

The Secret Life also represents a ubiquitous Hollywood tendency that all libertarians and even conservatives should reject out of hand: That television and other forms need to be instructive to youth and other idiot members of society who apparently take their moral cues from the small and large screens.

In a telling and all-too-common moment of Hollywood hubris, director Rob Reiner (who has made some good movies, I think) said, “Hollywood should not be making exploitive violent and exploitive sex films. I think we have a responsibility [to viewers] not to poison their souls.” Thanks, Meathead, but you don’t have access to my soul in the first place. Or those of my kids.

We may be what we eat (which explains the puddles of foie gras that form whenever I stand up), but we’re not what we watch, and creative expression needn’t be the ethical equivalent of a Cross Your Heart Bra, designed to uplift and separate us from our base instincts. And certainly the viewer, whether 15 years old or 45 (alas!), doesn’t need to watch The Secret Life of the American Teenager to know to use condoms or not drink and drive.

One of the great disconnects in American life over the past 30 years is that even as popular culture has been getting more graphic in its depictions of sex and violence, sexual behavior and violent crime among youth have been declining. Folks on the left like Reiner and many on the right often assume a connection between what we watch and how we act. That’s just not the way it works. Which is actually cause for relief.