30 Years Ago "That Kiss" happened with the release of Some Kind of Wonderful

John Hughes is undoubtedly the sage of teen films, and his short spectacular run of teen movies in the mid-1980s set the standard for teen cinema and "dramadies" for decades to come. Everyone knows the classics like Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and The Breakfast Club. But an equally endearing film that wasn't huge at the box office but developed an appropriate cult following in re-runs is Hughes' last film, Some Kind of Wonderful. The bittersweet comedy of Keith, Watts, and Ms. Amanda Jones turns 30 this week. And this classic story of romance and friendship endures decades later.

This month marks the 30th anniversaries of both the release of “Some Kind of Wonderful,” the last teen movie written by the genres’ 1980s svengali John Hughes, and the relationship between the film’s director Howard Deutch and star Lea Thompson, who met on set and began dating around the time of the “Wonderful” premiere. Unfairly branded as a gender-reversal retread of “Pretty in Pink,” a Hughes/Deutch collaboration from the year before, “Some Kind of Wonderful” was not a box office hit upon its release at the end of February 1987. Yet it endures as a late-arrival classic that holds its own among its better known Hughes siblings from the era, like “The Breakfast Club” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” Recent fair-minded portraits of young people and the uncertain boundaries of friendship and love — “Juno,” “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” “The Edge of Seventeen” — can legitimately be called its nieces and nephews.

And, who could forget "that kiss":