7 Movies From 1994 That All 1980s Kids Still Love Today
Simon Gallagher has worked in movie and TV journalism for more than 17 years. He has written more than 6000 articles and reviews, and edited thousands more. He is an expert in the entertainment industry, particularly in the golden age of screen superheroes. Simon is also a Rotten Tomatoes approved critic.
Like no decade before them, the 1990s saw a huge leap forward in digital innovation, and Hollywood was completely reshaped as a result. Where heavy effects work had been prohibitively expensive, and Tron’s creative wonders had left jaws hanging less than a decade earlier, VFX was being rolled out in even smaller-budget projects.
Blockbusters got a major shot in the arm, of course, as some of the most important and most creatively daring tent pole releases landed, setting new high bars on an almost yearly basis. Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Stargate, Independence Day, and The Mummy pushed what was possible to the limit. But character-driven epics like The Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, and Forrest Gump were also still showing remarkable pulling power for huge audiences.
It was a decade of split personalities, rather than one with an identity crisis, as the four audience quadrants broadened out and genres continued to flex their fandom muscles. A lot of popcorn was sold, both for adult audiences and the strong family and kids audiences that were spoiled with a wide variety of releases that refused to talk down to the MTV Generation with increasingly important spending power.
Even aside from the incredible movies featured here that shaped how ‘90s teens who were born in the 1980s fell in love with movies, there were other great additions that would break into lots of people’s all-time lists. The likes of Miracle on 34th Street, The Return of Jafar, Street Fighter, Richie Rich, North, Andre, The Little Rascals, and Baby’s Day Out were huge parts of 1994’s family movie culture, but they weren’t quite as good as the following eternally brilliant movies…
7 The Pagemaster
Now that CGI has taken hold of the high-concept fantasy genre, The Pagemaster feels even more like it belongs to a completely different time. But it was - and still is - a gem that used its mix of live-action and animation sequences incredibly well, and still captured just as much magic as more expensive modern rivals.
Like The NeverEnding Story a decade earlier, The Pagemaster also has a special nostalgic love for book readers, and tapped into every young bibliophile’s belief in the unspoken magic of libraries.
Macaulay Culkin stars as Richard Tyler, right at the end of his early 1990s family movie dominance (1995 saw the release of Richie Rich and the beginning of his Hollywood exile), and his wide-eyed charm carries perfectly into the animation, where he was joined by a cast featuring huge names like Christopher Lloyd, Patrick Stewart, Whoopi Goldberg, and Frank Welker. It’s still a joy now, and hasn’t aged at all thanks to the animation choice.
6 My Girl 2
The original My Girl is often most remembered for killing Macaulay Culkin’s Thomas J and showing the agony of youth, but the underrated sequel was an even more important coming-of-age story for kids of a certain age in 1994. Cruelly panned by critics, it takes Anna Chlumsky’s iconic Vada Sultenfuss to Los Angeles in the early 1970s in search of her dead mother’s story and an answer to doubts over who her father is.
It’s a delightfully charming, endearingly clumsy take on the transition from childhood into teenage years that the audience who’d grown up with Vada were also going through. That means the barbaric customs of ear-piercing, independence, being besotted with teachers, and finding actual young love were all achingly relevant. It also balanced surprising maturity with its thoughtful journey to self-discovery, and decades on, it's still one of the best coming-of-age movies of the 1990s.
5 Dumb and Dumber
Simultaneously both more grown up and far more immature than a lot of the straight family movies of the year, the Farrelly brothers’ slapstick comedy, Dumb & Dumber helped solidify Jim Carrey’s massive 1990s star power. It was also an instant playground quote generator for the years following 1994, with an impressively high joke rate, and an accessible PG-13 rating that avoided some of the Farrellys’ more Not Safe For School jokes elsewhere.
The story of Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne is disarmingly rich, thanks to the comedy chemistry of Carrey and Jeff Daniels, and has a great script that actually gives the sillier jokes more weight. There’s also a lot to be said for the naive charm of both Lloyd and Harry that avoids them ever becoming unlikable or irredeemable victims of the comedy.
4 D2: The Mighty Ducks
After the first movie gave hockey-loving kids a near-perfect Disney underdog story, the first sequel took things global, as Emilio Estevez’s Gordon Bombay returned to coaching to lead Team USA in the Junior Goodwill Games. Getting a pass for some serious nepotism, he reunites half of the Mighty Ducks with an injection of great newcomers from across the US - eventually including a young Kenan Thompson who sh*t-talks his way onto the team.
Like the original, the charm is in the underdog story, as the team meets their Ivan Drago-like enemy, the Icelandic team, and Bombay has to reckon with the lure of fame getting in the way of the purity of hockey. It’s cornball, admittedly, and critics hated it, but it’s aged far better than its 20% Rotten Tomatoes score suggests, and it does everything the original did well again. Awful naming convention for the sequels, though.
3 The Santa Clause
Alongside Home Alone, Miracle on 34th Street’s remake, and The Nightmare Before Christmas, Tim Allen’s The Santa Clause is easily among the very best Christmas movies of the 1990s. His everyman-turned-Santa transformation is a wonderfully charming story that takes advantage of his likability factor even when he’s playing slightly complicated characters like Scott Calvin.
The premise is pure Christmas magic as Calvin kills Santa Claus and takes his place... Okay, maybe not pure magic, but it’s a great premise, and it allows for some very good fish-out-of-water comedy and great world-building, as we discover the secret festive world that opens its doors to Allen’s hero. It was both warm enough and edgy enough to avoid being dismissed by 1994 teens as festive cringe. Today, it’s permanently joined the annual Christmas rotation for millions around the world.
2 The Mask
Wildly different from Jim Carrey’s other great 1994 comedy, The Mask was nevertheless just as reliant on his incredible physical ability. Adapted from the incredibly dark Dark Horse comic series, The Mask was just edgy enough without quite embracing the source material’s gleeful appetite for graphic violence. Instead, Carrey’s performance as Stanley Ipkiss heavily draws on the Looney Tunes slapstick of Tex Avery.
The effects are still great - and helped massively by Carrey’s physics- and biology-defying performance - and it fits surprisingly well with the trend of grown-up, dark superhero movies of the early 1990s that saw the likes of The Crow, Batman Returns, and Darkman ruling the silver screen rather than the brightness of Superman. This was effectively Carrey’s Beetlejuice moment, and gave 1994 kids both a raft of great The Mask quotes and something they’d literally never seen the likes of before.
1 The Lion King
The Disney Renaissance saw lots of greats, but none can really compete with The Lion King, which represented a monumental cultural moment in the summer of 1994 and has gone on to inspire a major cross-media franchise. Marrying Shakespeare’s Hamlet, African folklore, and the musical genius of Tim Rice and Elton John created the perfect balance of emotion for the tale of Simba’s journey from youthful hubris to reluctant triumph against his deliciously evil uncle, Scar.
The voice cast is ridiculously good, right from the brilliant contrast in Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Matthew Broderick’s Simba, through titans like James Earl Jones (Mufasa) and Jeremy Irons (Scar), and the comedy genius of Rowan Atkinson (Zazu), Nathan Lane (Timon), and Whoopi Goldberg, Cheech Marin, and Jim Cummings as the hyenas. It feels cruel not to name everyone else, such is the quality, but all of those performances rank high in the list of best ever Disney voice performances.
The Lion King is timeless, from its gripping story to its heartbreak, and it has one of the finest modern Disney soundtracks of all.
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