YMMV / Fast Times at Ridgemont High

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• Adaptation Displacement: Did you know this was based on a semi-nonfiction book?
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Linda really experienced when it comes to sex or is she lying to appear more mature and sophisticated? In one scene, Linda is clearly exaggerating about how long her boyfriend can last in bed but it is never confirmed if this was a mere exaggeration or an outright lie. This also begs the question, is her boyfriend/fiance even real?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • The scene where students are sniffing the tests? Probably lost on most people these days, but that actually used to happen. In the days before photocopy machines were commonplace (the late '80s or so), most schools still used a Mimeograph machine to copy handouts and tests.
  • People born after 1990 or so probably have trouble believing "television repairman" was ever a real career.
• And You Thought It Would Fail: Universal didn't think the film would become a hit. In fact, the studio had thought about not releasing it on the East Coast so that the film would die quickly at the box office.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Quick, what's the first thing you remember from this movie? Judge Reinhold getting fired from his job? The gas station robbery scene? Nah. You remember Phoebe Cates getting out of the pool and removing her bikini top. The story goes that video stores' copies of the VHS tape broke from having that scene re-wound and played over and over and over again. Thanks to this film, there is an entire generation of men who can't hear "Moving in Stereo" by The Cars without thinking of Phoebe Cates (and her boobs). It goes to the point that not even the scene in which Jennifer Jason Leigh gets completely naked is as well-remembered.
• Director Displacement: Cameron Crowe adapted the script from his own novel, but didn't direct it.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Jeff Spicoli. To the point that you'd think the movie was entirely about him from all the marketing.
• Fetish Retardant:
  • Stacy's sex scene with Mike starts off sexy, but after he finishes early and then immediately leaves, she is clearly so uncomfortable that it detracts from the earlier eroticism.
  • Even the famous pool scene has a bit of it, since it's actually an Imagine Spot and keeps getting interrupted by Judge Reinhold masturbating, and ends with Reinhold's character getting caught in the act.
• Heartwarming Moments: Brad picking up Stacy from the abortion clinic completely without judgement and promising not to tell their parents when she asks, as well as not pushing her when she doesn't want to divulge who got her pregnant.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Linda is obsessed with older men. In real life, Phoebe Cates is married to the much older Kevin Kline.
  • Spicoli's dream has him casually drop the word "fag". Twenty plus years later, Sean Penn portrayed a legendary gay rights activist in Milk.
• Just Here for Godzilla: The Phoebe Cates topless scene is so famous that some people have admitted to renting, buying, or illegally downloading the movie just so they could see it. In addition, as mentioned above in Best Known for the Fanservice, many video store owners have claimed that quite some copies of the film in their stores have tracking errors when the scene is featured, due to customers constantly playing and rewinding the scene over and over again.
• Les Yay: The original version of the scene where Linda tells Stacy how to give a perfect blowjob originally had them both naked in a hot tub. Damn censors.
• Memetic Mutation
  • The scene where Phoebe Cates climbs out of the pool and removes her top has been parodied countless times over the decades, with spoofs of the scene appearing in The Man Show, Family Guy, and even the video for "Stacy's Mom" by Fountains of Wayne.
  • While nowhere near as famous, the scene of Spicoli on the phone with his friend, repeatedly whacking himself on the head with his shoe to prove how stoned he is, is also quite popular.
• One-Scene Wonder: The Pool Scene Ship Teasing Brad and Linda.
• Parody Displacement: People who watch this movie today will not realize that the joke that involved Jeff Spicoli saving Brooke Shields from drowning at the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue is actually an allusion to The Blue Lagoon (1980), which Shields starred in.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Nicolas Cage as one of Brad's buddies.
  • Forest Whitaker, who played Jefferson, wouldn't really be a star for a few more years.
  • Nowadays, the film's second claim to fame (the first being the Phoebe Cates pool scene) is perhaps that Jeff Spicoli is played by Sean Penn, years before he established himself as an Academy Award-winning serious actor.
• Signature Scene: Linda coming out of the pool and removing her top to kiss Brad in his sexual fantasy.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The cheerleader played by Kelli Maroney has a good combination of humorous pep and dignified bitterness during her brief screentime that makes many people wish she'd at least been a secondary character.
• Values Dissonance:
  • There are several instances of passive homophobia, such as one student taping a note that reads "I'm a homo" to another student's back and Spicoli's exclamation of "Those guys are fags!", all stuff that's sadly not uncommon in high school settings. Considering how much more seriously the emotionally damaging consequences of this type of bullying are now taken, none of these jokes would pass nowadays.
  • The casual way that high school girls (including the fifteen-year-old Stacy) date men in their twenties and feel betrayed if those men avoid them for still being teenagers would be a lot less acceptable in a modern film.
• Vindicated by History: Upon release, the movie was largely panned by critics (no doubt due to the already-existing glut of high-school/college sex comedies during that era). Today, it's considered by many to be among the best high school movies ever made — and many of the film's vindicators are critics who had actually formerly bashed the film when it was released, admitting that they let their emotions cloud their judgments. It was added to The Criterion Collection in 2021.

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