Criterion Gets Nostalgic: THE BREAKFAST CLUB to Warm Hearts in January 2018
When it was released in February 1985, The Breakfast Club was very much 'of the moment,' capturing the zeitgeist of suburban American youth during the teenage years.
Coming off the modest success of his debut feature, Sixteen Candles, writer and director John Hughes was on a roll that hit a noxious bump with Weird Science and then soared again with Ferris Bueller's Day Off, before giving way to his masterpiece, Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
In the three decades since its release, however, The Breakfast Club has become a monument to nostalgia, as individuals who readily identify with one (or more) of the gleefully mawkish, stereotypical characters adapt it as their own and fondly recall their younger days while their children mock them mercilessly, even as they act out their own versions of the characters.
Now the film has been enshrined in the Criterion Collection, which will release it on Blu-ray in a new edition, including the following special features:
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
* 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
* Alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS-HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray
* Audio commentary from 2015 featuring actors Anthony Michael Hall and Judd Nelson
* New interviews with actors Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy
* New video essay featuring director John Hughes's production notes, read by Nelson
* Documentary from 2015 featuring interviews with cast and crew
* 50 minutes of never-before-seen deleted and extended scenes
* Rare promotional and archival interviews and footage
* Excerpts from a 1985 American Film Institute seminar with Hughes
* 1999 radio interview with Hughes
* Segment from a 1995 episode of NBC's Today show featuring the film's cast
* Audio interview with Molly Ringwald from a 2014 episode of This American Life
* PLUS: An essay by critic David Kamp
That's coming in January 2018, along with a new 4K restoration of John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), starring Henry Fonda; Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake (2016); G.W. Pabst's Westfront 1918 (1930), newly restored; and Eclipse Series 45: Claude Autant-Lara - Four Romantic Escapes from Occupied France, which Criterion says celebrates the director's "sophisticated and slyly subversive voice."
More information on the individual titles is available at the official Criterion site.
