YMMV / Hairspray (1988)

• Awesome Music: You know that little pocket of time in the early 60s, between Buddy Holly's death and The Beatles arriving in America? John Waters' soundtrack captures the dance crazes of that period very well, with lots of great pop nuggets from that time, including multiple Chubby Checker songs, "Shake a Tail Feather" by The Five Du-Tones, "The Madison Time" by The Ray Bryant Combo, and much more - all of which provide memorable dance scenes from the film. The official soundtrack release only captured a portion of these tunes due to licensing restrictions, but the film itself also has such classics as the legendary "Duke of Earl" by Gene Chandler and feminist anthem "You Don't Own Me" by Lesley Gore, and that just scratches the surface. John Waters really did his homework putting all this together.
• Adaptation Displacement: The stage musical and the 2007 movie are far more popular than the original 1988 movie.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: When running from the police, Tracy, Penny, Link and Seaweed hide in the apartment of a beatnik couple who invite them to get naked and smoke weed, and offer to iron the girls' hair to flatten it. Our clean-cut heroes naturally are freaked out and run away. However, Tracy and Penny using a clothing iron to straighten their hair becomes a Running Gag later on in the movie.
• Designated Hero: Tracy, Edna, and Maybelle can often be as mean-spirited as the people they oppose, and in the climax both Maybelle and her daughter Lil Inez resort to flat-out hostage-taking and terrorism of the governor to get what they want.
• Memetic Mutation: Divine's annoyed "Could you turn that racket down?! I'm trying to iron in here!
• Narm Charm: Tracy shows up to the climactic dance competition in a dress with pictures of roaches on it. As utterly ridiculous as it looks, it's fitting spite for all Amber's roach-themed taunting.
• Nightmare Fuel: Penny's mother in both versions of the film. Her parenting comes off as so extreme to the point that her own daughter fears her sometimes, and in the 1988 film she hires an abusive psychiatrist to perform hypnotism and electroshock therapy on her just because she's too racist to let her daughter date a black guy.
• Retroactive Recognition: Aside from being Ricki Lake's debut, it was also the first film for Colleen Fitzpatrick, who played Amber before going on to have mild success as a musician a decade later under the name Vitamin C.

---