Cereal Offenders Sound Research: The Breakfast Club

The Breakfast Club is a film from 1985 and is a comedy-drama about a group of students caught in Saturday detention. The film stars Judd Nelson, Holly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy among others and follows the exploits of the individual students, building upon their various differing wild personalities working together to survive under a power-hungry head teacher.

I chose to look at this film primarily due to the choice of music prevalent throughout the film as well as the comedy drama conventions young adult target audience used which our project would hope to emulate.

The music, of which was my primary focus, is very much a product of the time in which the film was made. The style consists of synthesizer heavy rock-pop which reached high popularity during the 1980s and is often considered nostalgic for modern audiences. However, the main song that is often remembered from this film is the opening and ending track 'Don't You (Forget About Me)' written and performed by Simple Minds.

The film opens and the drum beat of this song suddenly starts. This immediately grabs the attention of the viewer as the song eventually leads into the opening instrumental over the film titles.

Here is the opening to The Breakfast Club for reference (from 0:00 to 0:30):

It is this in particular that I feel I want to try and emulate for the opening of Cereal Offenders. This kind of opening makes the production feel much bigger and makes it stand out from other films of the same genre. A drum beat such as this would also help in initially grabbing the attention of our viewers, though this will need to remain consistent throughout the production. This style would also help to immediately let audiences know the intended genre that our project is trying to create due to familiarity of this kind of style of opening.

The nostalgic elements from this can also be found in other productions that share the genre of comedy drama such as Pitch Perfect which specifically references The Breakfast Club and how it uses this kind of music as a theme within the film itself.