The Brat Snack
Inspiration Corner
The decade: The 1980s.
The filmmaker: John Hughes.
The movies: The Breakfast Club(1985) and Pretty in Pink(1986)
The Brat Snack jumps through time to the 80’s, and mashes together John Hughes’s Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club, with a generous helping of spices thrown into the sausage mix
John Hughes: the man, the myth, the huge glasses. Not only the mind behind The Brat Snack’s key inspirations, but also the auteur responsible for Cat cat favorites like Home Alone, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Planes, Trains and Automobiles. His entire career was built on understanding the angst of being young and giving voices to dweebs and wastoids of all ages.
Out of many Hughes classics, The Breakfast Club serves as the backbone. One school, one Saturday, one vice principal with nothing better to do. Ralph and Casey took that setup and stuffed it into Sausage Arts High School of America, challenging their characters to bond, bicker, and come together to blend their specific spices.
That said, most of the character DNA actually comes from Pretty in Pink. Linky, Guy, James, and Blair are all loose doppelgängers of Ducky, Blane, Steff, and Andie. If you squint, Mr. Wurstvogel starts to look a lot like The Breakfast Club’s Richard Vernon. Actually, even if you don’t squint.
The Brat Snack also riffs on Pretty in Pink’s core theme: classism. The rich versus the poor. Bland large suit jackets versus the colorful attire of the "normies." When Linky calls Guy a "papie," he's not just name-calling—he’s calling out what he perceives as white-collar privilege. This was a common theme in '80s teen cinema, Ralph’s non-Hughesian personal favorite: Valley Girl (1983).
We encourage you to find all the countless references to both films in The Brat Snack. From overt nods to subtle Easter eggs, they’re all there, and of course, a buffet of sausage jokes. We invite you all to be sausage Kings of Chicago :P
Here’s a shrine!
Note: all images on this page were lovingly salvaged from these awesome Web 1.0 fan sites.
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