For Genre Grinder research:
There were teen and high school movies before the ‘80s – Beach Blanket movies, Rebel without a Cause, nostalgia movies like American Graffiti & Grease, or Carrie, which informed later movies, but was a dramatic horror movie. But the ‘80s spawned a specific type of high school teen comedy that became THE lore for high school on film.

For the sake of scope, we’re going to skip teen movies that really aren’t about school, which hard to measure. We’ll excuse this by calling those “coming-of-age” movies. High school movies CAN be coming-of-age and often are, but not all coming-of-age movies are about high school.

In addition, we’ll skip sports movies, even high school sports movies, which, sadly, means we won’t be covering Jessica Bendinger’s Stick It.

Most contentiously, we're skipping movies that are ostensively about teachers. They really aren't teen movies. This, along with idea that we're covering COMEDIES, comes down to subjective opinion, naturally.

This is also almost exclusively an American genre. Other countries participate and even tend to use the same mythology, post-'80s. But there's a separate genre of European boarding school movies from the '50s and '60s, like 400 Blows or If...
We'll only be covering 3 to 6 for the podcast and I can guarantee none will be John Hughes movies. Wide open to suggestions for this list, however!