12 of pop culture’s best birthday moments

Sam’s birthday surprise in Sixteen Candles

As a pop culture aficionado hailing from the Chicagoland area, it’s in my blood to obsessed with John Hughes movies. I count The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Home Alone among my all-time favorites, but my often lovesick teenage self wouldn’t want me to leave Sixteen Candles off this list, even though it’s admittedly a problematic pick. Obviously, it’s impossible to separate the film from its blatant racism in its depiction of Long Duk Dong, the Asian exchange student staying with Sam’s grandparents.

But if we’re discussing purely birthday scenes, Sixteen Candles has one of the most memorable. It could be argued that the whole movie is one long birthday scene, seeing as it’s a film about Samantha’s family forgetting her 16th birthday. The sweet scene between Sam and her dad when he apologizes for forgetting her birthday in all the chaos of her sister’s wedding weekend and she confides in him about her crush on Jake Ryan is partially tied to her birthday, of course. The iconic birthday scene, though, has to be the movie’s final minutes when Sam and her family are exiting the church after her sister’s wedding.

As cars pull away on the street outside, we see Jake Ryan leanly cooly against his red sports car. Samantha, decked in a totally ’80s bridesmaid’s dress, is all of us as awkward teens when she looks around trying to figure out who this dreamboat is waving to, as it couldn’t possibly be her. Only it is her, and I can’t watch the nervous energy buzzing between the two to this day without grinning. The only thing better than that charming nervous energy? The moment when Sam is able to get her dad’s attention just as she gets into Jake’s car, signaling that this is the boy she had been telling him about. It’s such a satisfying moment of authentic teenage joy.

-Gwendolyn Purdom, editor