YMMV / Stand by Me

• Accidental Innuendo: Weeping in Chris's arms, Gordie looks up into his friend's eyes and echoes his choice words of encouragement.
  Gordie: Guess I'd have to be pretty hard up, huh?
• Adaptation Displacement: Not a lot of people know the novella the movie is based on, much less that it was written by Stephen King. Even more unfortunately, though popular, it had largely faded from public awareness by the time another movie from the same book, Different Seasons (a collection of four novellas) had debuted. What's more is that both movies downplayed that they were based on Stephen King works, so the audience wouldn't mistake them for horror films.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Billy Tessio talks about how he's spent a month dating a girl who won't have sex with him. Given how Billy is a complete delinquent, is he still dating her after a month because he hopes she'll change her mind about sex, or because he cares about her even though she won't have sex with him?
• Can't Un-Hear It: It's hard to read "The Body" without hearing Richard Dreyfuss narrating.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Lots of people puking is normally gross, but Lard Ass Hogan sequence goes so over the top with the vomiting (and mixed with the Special Effects Failure below) it loops back around from merely being disgusting into hilarity.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The film was massively popular in Japan, to the point where special versions of the movie were sold intended to teach English. (So the reference to this movie in Pokémon Red and Blue is not a Woolseyism.)
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Gordie and Chris' friendship becomes this as Wil Wheaton and River Phoenix's real-life friendship fell apart by the early 90s, and Phoenix, like his character in this film, died young.
  • As depicted in the film, Gordie was The Unfavorite of his parents. Years later, Wil Wheaton depicted a very detailed account of his father's verbal abuse towards him throughout his life and his mother enabling it; relatively similar to Gordie's upbringing.
  • Corey Feldman was abused by his parents like Teddy, to the point where he would eventually become emancipated. The actor had anger issues like Teddy, accordingly; and he would later have his own legal issues due to his drug addiction.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: While Gordie never got his cherished Yankees cap back, years later filmmaker Hayden Schayde (a fan who has traveled around the world visiting various filming locations) met Wil Wheaton at Comic.com and gave him a replacement.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: At one point in the film Teddy threatens to rip Pressman's head off and shit down his throat. Several years after this movie's release, a certain video game character would not only use this same threat, but also follow through with it as well.
• Ho Yay: Chris and Gordie are incredibly close - and both get a scene where they cry into the other's arms. It is made clear that they see each other as family, but still.
• Jerkass Woobie: Teddy is short-tempered, obnoxious, cruel and nasty but his home life sounds so horrible you can't help but feel for him. His fate later in life — denied entry in the army and doing jail time is even sadder.
• Moral Event Horizon: Ace pulls a knife on Chris and says "no problem" when the latter says he'll have to kill him. All over getting the credit for finding Ray Brower's body.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • The "Lard Ass" story, especially the ending, where the title character vomiting sets off a chain reaction of everyone present following suit.
  • The boys finding leeches on their bodies after they swim through the swamp. Gordie finds one in his underwear and faints because of it.
• Signature Scene: The kids walking along the railroad tracks. Similar shots have since tended to pop up as a shorthand for childhood nostalgia.
• Special Effects Failure: In the scenes of Gordie's Story Within a Story about Lard-Ass, it's obvious that the "vomit" streams are coming from a hose behind each actor and that there's nothing coming out of their mouths.
• Values Dissonance: While not used all that much throughout the movie, several characters throw around the words "retard" and "faggot" as insults. These were just considered rude, bog standard insults back in the eighties, but nowadays are considered extremely derogatory slurs against the disabled and LGBT people, and are considered absolutely unacceptable to use today.
• The Woobie:
  • Gordie has been neglected by his parents his whole life and truly believes that he should have died instead of his brother (who was the only member of the family to care about him). At least the end sequence shows he has a good relationship with his own son.
  • Chris comes from a troubled family, is bullied by his brother and gets taunted by a Sadist Teacher. He truly believes he's worth nothing. And just when he makes something of his life, he dies stopping a mugging.
  • Davey Hogan, the hero of Gordie's Story Within a Story.
  • Ray Browers. He was just out picking blueberries when he was horribly killed. When the kids find his body, the full reality of it truly hits them and they see a kid no older than they are and how his life was cruelly ended by nothing more than bad luck.

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