Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was one of the 1980s teen movies that I never got around to seeing. This was not a conscious decision on my part. (No one thought of “boycotting” movies back then.) Rather, it was more like an oversight.
For one thing, the movie was released on June 11, 1986. This was the week after I graduated from high school. Perhaps I had a sense that having graduated myself, watching movies about high school kids was no longer an entirely appropriate thing for me to do. I had, after all, eagerly watched early teen films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and The Breakfast Club (1985). But I had no time for Ferris and his adolescent adventures. For me, the most memorable film experience of the summer of 1986 was the original Top Gun.
I’ve rewatched Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Breakfast Club as an adult. I’ve toyed with the idea of watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But I fear that moment has simply passed. I’m now 56 years old. I have even less interest in watching a teen movie in 2024 than I did in the summer of 1986.
One factoid for you, though: that movie I never saw was a box office success. So much so, that the dust had barely settled on the movie, before Hollywood got to work on a spin-off TV series, entitled Ferris Bueller.
The TV series was short-lived. It ran for only a single season, from 1990 to 1991. Youth culture has always been fickle and fast-changing. What was cool for high school kids in 1986 was uninteresting for high schoolers a mere four or five years later.
I only recently learned of the television series’ existence. 1990 and 1991 were busy years for me; I wasn’t watching much television.
Among the members of the Ferris Bueller cast was Jennifer Aniston, who was then unknown, and probably less annoying than she is now. But even Aniston could not make a success of Ferris Bueller the television show.
-ET