It’s August, gang, and across this great fruited plain of ours, Americans are gearing up for that most turbulent of seasons: back to school. Many of us are already back in session, and the rest are getting ready to eke out those last bits of summertime fun before the doors fly open. Stores are stocked with pencils, students are picking out their first day outfits, parents are trying to get them to answer questions for their “Back to School” social media posts, and teachers are doing their best to keep the economy of Columbia solvent by buying all of the coffee. And what better way to commemorate this change of seasons than with another installment of everyone’s favorite Geek Punditry feature-within-a-feature, PLAYING FAVORITES? 

If you’re new, here’s how it works: a couple of weeks before a playing favorites column, I go out on social media and give my peeps a topic, such as SCHOOL, and ask them to suggest different categories for me to talk about. Then I select my favorite categories from your suggestions and tell you all what I think are some of the best of the best in each one of them. It’s a good time for everybody. So let’s see what kind of back to school shenanigans were on your minds this week, shall we?

Dawson Casting

Steven J. Rogers asked for some of my favorite examples of actors who are a little “long in the tooth” for their role as a high school student. The experts in this phenomenon (by which I mean the editors of TV Tropes) call it Dawson Casting, the practice of using actors in their 20s or even 30s to play high school students, named for the TV executive who invented the system, Herringbone Q. Casting.

No, seriously, it’s named for the show Dawson’s Creek, which is one of the most well-known examples of the trope, but it’s by no means the FIRST and certainly not the WORST. The trope goes back hundreds of years. Even Shakespeare is likely to have indulged in it – Hamlet, for instance, is supposed to be a college student, but there are lines in the fifth act that indicate that he used to get piggyback rides from his father’s court jester, who has explicitly been dead and buried for 23 years. Unless ol’ Yorick was playing games with Hamlet as a zygote, the math don’t math. 

There are two ways to look at this question: am I trying to figure out who did it BEST – as in, which older actors were most convincing as teens? Or am I trying to figure out who did it in the most ENTERTAINING fashion, as in making me burst out laughing when a guy who could be doing commercials for Metamucil saunters into homeroom? I’ll answer both.

As far as who was the most convincing, I think the crown has to go to the TV version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When that show launched in 1997, Sarah Michelle Gellar was 20 playing a 15-year-old – and to be fair, that’s a much smaller gap than many Dawsons have had to contend with over the years. But she was the YOUNGEST member of the main cast. Alyson Hannigan was 23 and Nicolas Brendan 26, and all of them were pretty convincing as teenagers. The only one who you couldn’t really buy was Charisma Carpenter (27 at the time). And while you aren’t really shocked to hear that these actors were in their 20s, it’s not nearly as blatant as some of the more hilarious examples of this trope. 

In general, the shows that get away with this the best are the ones that don’t try to get away with as much. The high school students in Cobra Kai were mostly in their early 20s when the show began, and not noticeably too old. On Smallville, I don’t think that Tom Welling was really successful at convincing anybody that he was 14 years old in season one (the actor was 24 at the time), but the rest of the cast was mostly in their early 20s and far more convincing. I suppose the trick with pulling a Dawson is to not press your luck.

You know who DID press their luck? Stranger Things. It wasn’t a problem in the first couple of seasons – with the five main kids played by actual…y’know…KIDS. And even the teenagers were pretty convincing: Joe Keery (Steve) was 24 playing 17, Natalia Dyer (Nancy) was 21 playing 16, Charlie Heaton (Jonathan) was 22 playing 16, and all of them were believable as high school students. But the long gaps between seasons were starting to strain credulity even in season four, and Keery is going to be 32 playing 19 or 20 in the show’s upcoming final season. He may be able to pull it off, but the likes of Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin) and Finn Wolfhard (Mike) playing 15 at the age of 22 are going to be a harder sell, especially since we’re all so familiar with what they looked like AS KIDS. 

But I don’t think any show has ever been as hilariously Dawsoned as the 70s sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter. When the show began in 1975, you had high school students played by John Travolta (then 21), Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs (23), Robert Hegyes (24) and Ron Palillo (26) and frankly, I would have guessed older for each of them. While they were around the same ages as many of the other “teenage” actors we’ve already discussed, they were nowhere near as successful at hiding their age. Alyson Hannigan could pass as a high school student, whereas Ron Palillo looked more like somebody’s podiatrist. Gabe Kaplan was once quoted as saying that the reason the show’s ratings collapsed after three seasons is that the cast was getting too old to convincingly play teenagers, which made me ask the obvious question: at what point DID he think they were convincing? 

School Sitcoms

Rachel Ricks asked for some of my favorite school sitcoms. This is an interesting subject for me. Like so many of us, I grew up watching shows like Saved By The Bell, and I loved it. And while I never really thought that show was a documentary on the lives of high school students (I must have tried that “Time Out” thing a hundred times before I got hit by that marching snare drummer and decided to call it quits), I at least thought that it would get the SPIRIT of being high school right.

Damn, was that off. It’s almost hard to watch that show now, especially as a teacher myself, not only because of how inaccurate that show is in regards to how a school actually works, but because it casts virtually every adult as a total blithering idiot. Seriously, go back and watch that show sometime – it’s a miracle Mr. Belding can even tie his shoes. 

So when it comes to “school sitcoms,’ showing actual respect for teachers is a high priority for me, and that’s why I can’t stop talking about Abbott Elementary. It’s the rare school show that makes the teachers the stars rather than the students AND treats their characters with respect AND does a pretty accurate job of showing what school life is like. Granted, the teachers on that show have a bit more free time away from their students than a real elementary school teacher ever would, but I’m willing to allow that for the sake of comedy. What’s more, the characters all have real depth and charm, and most of them are very good at what they do. Plus the show deals with real issues such as government funding, parental involvement, and other issues that teachers fight against every single day, but does it in a way that’s entertaining. I can’t say enough good things about this show.

I mentioned how the adults in Saved By the Bell are all buffoons. This is true, but it’s hardly exclusive to Bayside High. If you look back on the annals of TV shows in a school setting, I would guess 90 percent of the teachers (and parents, for that matter) are portrayed as morons. And for that reason, I have to have a special place in my heart for Boy Meets World. The show traces Ben Savage’s character (Cory Matthews) from elementary school through college, and although there were goofy grownups on occasion, that was by no means the norm. In fact, the show gives us William Daniels as Mr. Feeny, probably the Gold Standard against which all TV teachers should be measured. He’s compassionate, wise, understanding, but firm when necessary. He’s almost as much a parent to Cory as he is a teacher. Is it really realistic that he taught the same group of kids from fifth grade until they’re going for their undergraduate degrees? Absolutely not. But it’s an acceptable break from reality in the name of keeping such a fantastic character front and center in the show.

And although it’s not a television show, I love Archie Comics. I mean CLASSIC Archie Comics, their teenage sitcom romcom years, not the way they were adapted on Riverdale. I’m talking about the eight decades of comic strips about Archie Andrews struggling to choose between Betty and Veronica and going to Riverdale High. As a kid, I loved reading the stories (Jughead was kind of an icon for me) and as an adult I’ve come to appreciate the fact that the faculty of Riverdale High School – Miss Grundy, Professor Flutesnoot, Coach Clayton, Mr. Weatherbee – are usually portrayed as good, caring teachers who are doing their best for their students, even if they’re doing so while trying to avoid whatever catastrophe Archie is pulling along in his wake. 

High School Superheroes

Lew Beitz wants to know who some of my favorite high school superheroes are. It’s an interesting question – in the early days of comic books, there weren’t a lot of teenage superheroes. The kids were relegated to the sidekick role for most of the Golden Age, and it wasn’t until the 60s – specifically with the introduction of Spider-Man – that having a teenager as the main star of a superhero series started to come into vogue. Spidey eventually went off to college and became an adult, but he remains the template for superheroes that are still in their high school years. Everyone from Firestorm to Invincible to Ms. Marvel (the current Kamala Khan version) has drawn inspiration from those early Stan Lee/Steve Ditko comics, and none of them are shy about it.

I’m going to try to limit my response to characters for whom school – or at least their classmates – are a major factor in their stories. Teen Titans, for example, isn’t going to work because the vast majority of those comics don’t include school as a setting at all, instead being the stories of kid superheroes who hang out independently of their own lives. So keeping school in mind, it’s hard to think of anybody who has done it better than Peter Parker’s DAUGHTER (in one corner of the multiverse, anyway), May Parker, the amazing Spider-Girl. Created by Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz in 1997, this storyline comes from a world where Peter Parker aged more or less in “real time” from the 1960s and, at this point, had a teenage daughter who inherited his powers. Originally intended as a one-off character in an issue of What If?, “Mayday” Parker proved wildly popular and spun off into her own long-running series. And just like her dad, the supporting cast was largely full of her high school contemporaries – friends, rivals, potential love interests and so forth. Few comic books since those early days of Amazing Spider-Man had made such good use of the cast of teenagers, and I think it’s one of the reasons that this series remains a fan favorite, even though these days May herself only pops up once in a while during a “Spider-Verse” thing.

And although Lew specified HIGH school, I have to give a special shout out to a series about ELEMENTARY school superheroes, Aaron Williams’ PS238. This comic book featured a cast of preteen titans, many of them the children of adult superheroes, who attended a special school deep beneath a “normal” elementary school where they were all ostensibly students. The book is really funny, and does a great job of picking apart many of the tropes and cliches of superhero comics. One student, for example, has the amusingly dull superhero code name “84,” because she is the 84th person registered with the standard FISS (flight, invulnerability, speed, and strength) powerset. Although the book IS very funny, it’s also a solid superhero comic book, creating a rich world with a fascinating history and a lot of secrets to uncover. The comic lasted only 51 issues, which wasn’t nearly long enough, although Williams has continued the adventures of the characters as a webcomic. 

High School Horror

Finally my wife Erin – who absolutely understands her brand – wants me to talk about my favorite high school horror movies. And naturally, there is one that leaps right to the forefront of the mind, a chilling, terrifying tale that will ring out through the annals of academia from now until the end of time.

Project ALF.

Actually, this might not be as easy as it sounds. Sure, there’s no shortage of horror movies about TEENAGERS, but how many of them actually have SCHOOL as a dominant setting? Friday the 13th, of course, is set at a summer camp. Some of the other stalwarts of the slasher genre like Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream, may incorporate a school into the story (especially in the earlier installments), but the school is largely incidental. If the characters weren’t teenagers, you could have them all going to work and not much else would need to be changed.

So for horror that’s actually ABOUT a school, I’m going to give a shout out to a movie that I really think is underrated – Robert Rodriguez’s sci-fi/horror movie The Faculty. In what is essentially an updated version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Frodo Baggins and a group of high school students start to see signs that the faculty of their high school have become overcome by parasitic alien invaders, conquerors from beyond the stars who are coming to take over the Earth. Of course, it’s only this band of high school misfits that have a hope of stopping them. The Faculty came out in 1998, riding a wave of post-Scream teenage horror movies, and it somewhat got lost in the mix. But it’s a good movie, one that defies the surge of slasher knockoffs that it was swimming amongst, and has its own identity that’s pretty darn entertaining.

Carrie, of course, is another classic of this particular subgenre. The movie is based on Stephen King’s first published novel, so the story of Carrie White really is what made his name in two different mediums. Sissy Spacek is Carrie – a teenage girl who has lived a sheltered life with a brutal, unforgiving fundamentalist mother. A rather late onset of physical maturation brings with it a telekinetic power of great destructive potential, and when her crueler classmates push Carrie too far, the blood flows. It’s a great movie, although I’ve always felt like Carrie was less a villain than a victim – an innocent who is beaten and berated until she actually breaks, and when someone with her kind of powers break, the consequences will be devastating. 

Finally, as someone who enjoys a good horror/comedy hybrid, I want to give a shout out to the 2020 film Freaky, directed by Christopher Landon and written by Landon and Michael Kennedy. This film is a slasher movie crossed with the body swap comedy of Freaky Friday. Millie Kessler, a bullied high school senior (Kathryn Newton), is attacked by a serial killer called the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughan), who has gotten his hands on a cursed knife. The attack winds up swapping their minds, placing the Butcher’s consciousness in Millie’s body and vice versa (which is another example of a body swap comedy). A lot of the fun of this movie comes from watching Vaughn’s performance as a teenage girl, trying to get Millie’s friends on his side while Newton goes on a killing spree. It’s a really good movie, and helped Newton blow up to a point where she’s showing up in Marvel movies, while still doing indie horror like Lisa Frankenstein.

That’s it for this week, guys. There will be more Playing Favorites next week, and if you’ve got some more suggestions, they’re welcome. In the meantime, a reminder for those parents who have yet to get their kids back-to-school supplies:

There is no excuse for Rose Art crayons. Ever. Just don’t. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. Have you ever tried to color an entire page with one of those stupid Rose Art sticks? You may as well be using a candle.