I’ve been using the year to bounce around the various streaming services to try and catch some movies having Anniversary years that also are available with audio description. This John Hughes classic is on Amazon, and that means I’m not sure if it has human audio description. I’m leaning toward No, but I’ve heard much worse. It is possible they’ve started using better voices, but these films don’t have audio description credits, so it is hard to tell if that is what this is. This is actually my first time through this, and I’m probably going to ruin your nostalgia.
Progressive generations have made more and more determinations about what is and is not acceptable in films, which often causes detriment to the entirety of the project. So, one specific thing can tank a movie, like having a star who later was “cancelled”, or just simply having shitty representation. The sad thing is, I know for a lot of people, this incredibly relatable Molly Ringwald performance speaks to them. A cute premise has her entire family forget her birthday. Justin Henry, the boy from Kramer Vs Kramer who earned an Oscar nomination, is in the cast. We have very early versions of John and Joan Cusack. There’s a great 80’s soundtrack.
And then there’s Long Duck Dong. The name is bad enough, as something we’d have to reckon with anyway at some point for being casually racist, but John Hughes goes further and has a gong play every time this walking stereotype comes in frame. It is so old. He doesn’t just do it one time, which is bad enough, he does it every time and beats his “joke” so it dies a horrible death. It feels so awkward to watch going in clean in 2024.
Add to that, Anthony Michael Hall’s “geek” gains popularity by performing typical teen shenanigans. I care less about the panties sequence, because she does willingly give him her underwear, but he later has a barely conscious girl in his car and tries to get his friends to photograph him with this unconscious woman like something happened.
Watching this gave me a different opinion on John Hughes. Yes, some of the language is objectionable, but if I grew up in the 90’s, and kids were saying this shit, they were definitely saying that and much worse a decade before. So that is real. But, the unconscious girl doesn’t play well today, and the gong sound was never OK.
Molly Ringwald is delightful though, and I’m surprised she didn’t break out moren into an adult career like Julia Robert’s when she grew up. But, sorry Sixteen Candles fans, you don’t want me to grade this. It has audio description if your nostalgia needs to be quenched, and the audio description was fine for what I assume is TTS with a voice that isn’t god awful. But, I can’t actually endorse a film knowing that these gong sounds were never OK. It’s like blackface. Yes, people used it to portray characters but they did so because black people were not allowed on those stages. Later on, blackface became even more racist than simply playing Othello. It aggravated stereotypes. Perhaps Madame Butterfly wasn’t always cast ethnically appropriate back in the day, but at a certain point, we had the talent, and someone should have told John Hughes that fucking gong isn’t funny.
