A lot has changed in the decades since The Breakfast Club first hit theatres in 1985 – a year also noteworthy for the Live Aid fundraising concerts, Wayne Gretzky steering the Edmonton Oilers to their second consecutive Stanley Cup, and the release of Whitney Houston’s eponymous, debut album.
John Hughes’ enduring coming-of-age dramedy stars Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy as five seemingly dissimilar high school kids bonding during a daylong Saturday detention in their school’s library. And despite the simple premise, many elements of the film became entrenched in the pop culture lexicon.
“Eat my shorts,” the sneering clapback long attributed to Bart Simpson, was in fact first invoked by the rebellious teen John Bender (Nelson) toward nasty supervising vice principal Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason) in the film. Meanwhile, The Breakfast Club’s iconic poster, featuring its young stars posed in a pyramid shape and photographed by Annie Leibovitz, has been gently spoofed many times, from 2018’s Ready Player One to 2023’s Bottoms.
The associated trivia is endless. Take the film’s final shot, with Bender pumping his fist in the air, ecstatic at having connected with Ringwald’s Claire. In addition to being among cinema’s most memorable finales, the gesture was apparently unscripted and added spontaneously by Nelson.
Above all, the film created the gold standard for smart teen-themed dramedies, its empathetic script a northern star guiding countless subsequent titles, from Rushmore (1998) to Mean Girls (2004), The Edge of Seventeen (2016) and Booksmart (2019).
As we approach The Breakfast Club’s 40th anniversary on February 15, we looked back at the many ways it impacted pop culture while celebrating its benevolent and evergreen message that, beneath the surface, we are all more alike than we are different.
It Nudged Simple Minds to the Mainstream
Prior to the inclusion of Don’t You (Forget About Me) in The Breakfast Club, which became a smash hit in North America, the Scottish combo headed by singer Jim Kerr and guitarist Charlie Burchill – who cut the song, written by producer Keith Forsey and guitarist Steve Schiff – were best known to alternative music fans for their angular and wildly propulsive oeuvre.
Don’t You (Forget About Me) changed all that; the group’s subsequent albums, though successful, never recaptured the blazing originality of 1979’s Real to Real Cacophony, 1980’s Empires and Dance or, especially, 1982’s New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) – which was voted album of the year by once iconic and influential Toronto radio station CFNY. Legend has it that Simple Minds initially demurred on recording the track, as they didn’t write it, but were eventually persuaded. Other shortlisted candidates included Billy Idol, Bryan Ferry, and Canada’s own Corey Hart.
The Film Made Instant and Lasting Stars of Its Cast
Foreshadowing the so-called Brat Pack – a contentious term coined by New York writer David Blum in a June 1985 cover story that included The Breakfast Club’s principal cast – the film cemented the burgeoning fame of its stars. Ringwald and Hall had already gained immense notice the year before in Sixteen Candles, another John Hughes teen entry. Meanwhile, Nelson, Estevez and Sheedy blew up in St. Elmo’s Fire, also from 1985 (and which swept Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, and Demi Moore into the rarefied orbit that Blum identified).
Interestingly, last year, Andrew McCarthy issued a doc called Brats surveying the yin-and-yang impact that inclusion in the Brat Pack had on himself, Estevez, Moore et al, who seem to have softened on the moniker over time. As a footnote, St. Elmo’s Fire today has a middling 43 per cent rating on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. The Breakfast Club? A rock-solid 89 percent.
Sushi Is a Thing?
It may seem hard to believe in 2025, but back in 1985, when Nelson’s Bender asks Ringwald’s Claire what the heck she is eating for lunch – she has brought sushi, complete with a mini soy sauce bottle and chopsticks – he was voicing a question many in the audience, not to mention his mystified classmates, were also asking. Sushi had not yet gone global, but upscale Claire was hip. As such, the scene was many people’s first exposure to the Japanese staple.
When Claire explains that it’s “rice, raw fish, and seaweed,” an incredulous Bender retorts, “You won’t accept a guy’s tongue in your mouth, and you’re gonna eat that?” It’s just one of innumerable classic lines from The Breakfast Club. See also: “Does Barry Manilow know that you raid his wardrobe,” “Don’t mess with the bull, young man, you’ll get the horns” and the above-mentioned “Eat my shorts.”
It Definitively Branded the Familiar High School Cliques
At the start and close of the film, Anthony Michael Hall’s Brian Johnson character reads, in voiceover, the collective assigned essay the group submits to Vice-Principal Vernon. “We think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are,” he says. “You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal.”
Every current and former high school student knows/knew those stifling categories, but they hadn’t been deeply explored prior to The Breakfast Club because – with the possible exception of Rebel Without a Cause from 1955 and 1961’s West Side Story – teens hadn’t typically been depicted as fully realized, multidimensional people on screen. Even athletes and criminals have feelings.
It Brought the Trivia and Sparked Two Existential Questions
Like most classic films, The Breakfast Club is larded with fun trivia. It’s set at fictional Shermer High School in suburban Illinois, which also pops up in John Hughes’ Weird Science from 1985 (look for the sign in the gym scene) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off from 1986 (it’s written on a banner hanging in a hallway). Hughes even makes a fleeting cameo as Brian’s dad, who picks him up at the end of detention.
Carl Reed, the sympathetic janitor on duty that day (played by John Kapelos) is briefly pictured as 1969’s “Man of the Year” at the same high school where he now pushes a broom when the camera surveys the empty school near the film’s beginning. And so on. Then there are two burning questions The Breakfast Club posits for deep thinkers: when the quintet returns to class Monday morning, will they remain allies or retreat into their former cliques? Also, didn’t Ally Sheedy’s Allison look better – certainly more unique – before Claire’s makeover? It might be time for a rewatch.
RELATED:
Brats: Andrew McCarthy Talks His New Doc and Coming to Terms with the “Brat Pack” Label
From Jaws to Dog Day Afternoon, Celebrating Classic Films Turning 50 in 2025
Miami Vice Turns 40: From the Clothes to the Cast, How the 80s Classic Reinvented TV
