I don't think I saw that, but I've had little luck trying to watch 80s movies with today's youth. In retrospect, "Heathers" is bound to hit differently.

The only thing I really remember from Adventures in Babysitting other than the blues scene is the little girl's love for the Mighty Thor (and some guy's -- the tow truck driver's? -- Thor-oid appearance).

The movies that always stuck with me on this front, weird infusions of stuff from the '80s/early '90s where you can see the screenwriters trying to dial in the racial dynamics, are Brewster's Millions (1985), in which the biracial and light-skinned Loretta McKee is the lawyer who can be the love interest for both Eddie Murphy and his (white) antagonist, and the slightly later Money Train, with Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson as (adoptive) brothers who are also cops, and J-Lo as their fellow cop who is the apex of their love triangle.

Kind of wild you got Loretta McKee right but you mixed up Eddie Murphy with Richard Pryor.

The only thing I really remember from Adventures in Babysitting other than the blues scene is the little girl's love for the Mighty Thor (and some guy's -- the tow truck driver's? -- Thor-oid appearance).

Good memory! Not the tow truck driver, but the guy at the repair shop when they pick the car up.

The only part I remembered prior to rewatching it was the best friend who was missing her glasses, cuddling the little kitten that turns out to be a rat.

The Thor thing was, like, the most prominent representation of a Marvel character in a movie up to that point, through the X-Men movie 15 years later. All of us wee comics geeks cherished it.

3: FFS, that's embarrassing. (I had just been reading something about Dolemite Is My Name, but that's no excuse.)

I first saw Adventures In Babysitting as an adult (maybe 15 years ago), and was surprised (a) that it held up fairly well and (b) at recognizing Bradley Whitford as the obnoxious boyfriend.

I was relieved it held up as well as it did, tbh. There was nothing egregious to unpack. And the pacing is surprisingly snappy for a movie from that era, in my opinion.

I remember, at the time, recognizing Chris Columbus's name as the director but, by now, I had to look him up. It appears to be his first movie, but he went on to direct Home Alone, Mrs Doubtfire, and two Harry Potter movies.

This quote from his IMDB page is funny:

I was up on 140th Street in Harlem, in 1992. It was 3 in the morning, and I was walking back to get a cup of coffee. These two young kids came up to me and said to me, "What movie is this?" I said, "Home Alone 2," and they said, "What do you do?" And I said, "I'm the director." They said, "Oh, you're John Hughes!"

In the eighties, it was pretty common to make a movie about rasist stereotypes and then try to reduce the offensiveness by making all the black characters good, intellignet people. Beverly Hill Cop and Trading Places comes to mind. But the most extreme was Soul Man.

High concept: white bro (C. Thomas Howell) gets into Harvard Law School, but doesn't get financial aid because his father is rich, but won't pay. So bro puts on blackface and gets a perm to get a scholarship available to black students only, wears a daishiki, joins the black student group, dates Rae Dawn Chong, etc. (not sure if they kiss on screen). James Earl Jones is the mentor/professor.

Typical joke: Blackface guy gets picked first for dorm basketball, and it turns out he's terrible. When the scam is uncovered months later, the white basketball bros look at each other and say something like, "that explains it."

Anyway, it did not succeed in becoming inoffensive, but your kids might like it, and it is definitely thematically connected to Adventures in Babysitting.

The crime element does not line up along racial lines. The villains are the members of this high end car theft ring, which is sort of a mash up of white mobsters and black gangs. There's a gang fight on the subway, and both gangs are also racially diverse. Both of those racial mashups look phony

This was definitely a thing in 80s films - gangs had to be diverse. "The Warriors", "Robocop", "Die Hard" etc.

(Vaguely related: the throwaway joke in "The Last Action Hero" which makes it clear that the main job of the police watch sergeant in the fictional world is to ensure that *all* buddy cop duos are mismatched for dramatic purposes. "Euler! You're with Waterman. Kraus, you're teamed up with the rabbi.")

Oh god, I remember Soul Man. White grievance learns that the truth is somewhere in the middle.

11 puzzled me because I had a vague idea that C. Thomas Howell actually was black.

I was apparently confusing him with Thomas Sowell.

I got Danny Glover and Donald Glover confused and my first thought was "this guy is aging really well."