One of the distinct joys of parenthood is exposing my kids to the movies that I loved when I was a kid. And my kids’ ages cover such a wide span (age 3-17 years old) that it gives me an excuse to re-visit childhood favorites more than once.Last night we revisited one of my wife’s favorite films from her childhood, a not-widely-known classic from 1989 called Shag with Phoebe Cates, Annabeth Gish, and Bridget Fonda. The film takes place in 1963 and follows four high school graduates in South Carolina who go to Myrtle Beach for a secretive, end-of-summer adventure. It’s a cute little movie, and my kids liked it.Mission accomplished.As I thought about the film, it occurred to me that it was the third 1980s film in a row that I’ve shown my kids that takes place between the mid 1950s and mid 1960s: Stand by Me was released in 1986 and took place in 1959, and Back to the Future was released in 1985 and took place largely in 1955.What are the chances? Well, the more I thought about it, I discovered the chances are pretty good. A slew of movies in the 1980s were set in the years between 1955 and 1965. Among them: Porky’s (took place in the mid-fifties), Losin’ It (1965), The Outsiders (1965), Peggy Sue Got Married (1960), Little Shop of Horrors (1960), Dirty Dancing (1963), Dead Poets Society (1959) and many others.And that doesn’t include the biopics from that time like La Bamba, which told the story or Ritchie Valens and took place in the late fifties, or Great Balls of Fire!, about Jerry Lee Lewis in the fifties. Or the films about historical events that took place during that time period like Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Born on the 4th of July, or Mississippi Burning.When I first started thinking about this, I thought I had the answer. The directors of these films were probably teens in the fifties and sixties, and by the eighties they were the people making the movies. They romanticized their younger years in a huge wave of nostalgia.If that were true, then we might expect films of the past ten or fifteen years to look back at the 1980s. Many directors now would have been teens in that decade, so it only makes sense that they’d make movies in a similar wave of nostalgia.But then I tried to think of a film made in the past ten or fifteen years that was set in the 1980s. And I came up with…Go ahead, try.It’s not easy, is it?There’s The Wedding Singer, but that was made in the late nineties, and made fun of the eighties. Hot Tub Time Machine took place in the eighties. (It’s no Back to the Future.) Rock of Ages celebrated eighties hair bands. Perhaps the only film that I can think of that actually describes the sort of phenomenon I have in mind is a wonderful movie called Adventureland, which was made in 2009 and tells the story of some 1980s kids working at an amusement park.The lack of modern films set in the eighties begs the question, what does Hollywood have against the eighties?Your guess is as good as mine.It’s interesting, however, that the fascination with the sixties that was so prevalent in the eighties, continued beyond that decade. In the early nineties Mermaids, which takes place in 1963, and The Sandlot, which takes place a year earlier, were released. And since then, the trend has continued: Catch Me if You Can, The Help, That Thing you Do, Moonrise Kingdom, Across the Universe and Down with Love all revisit that time period. And that doesn’t even account for the biopics: Capote, Walk the Line, J. Edgar, etc.Maybe it’s because the contemporary films in the eighties, those made about the eighties, in the eighties, are so damn good that no one wants to be compared to them. After all, how do you improve on The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Risky Business, Can’t Buy Me Love, Revenge of the Nerds, Goonies and on and on?And really, would Back to the Future be half as exciting if it was released today and Marty McFly went back thirty years to end up 1984 instead of 1955? Type your email address in the box and click the "create subscription" button. My list is completely spam free, and you can opt out at any time.