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All week long: Revisit the highlights and lowlights of 1987 with Popverse's Made in 87 week.

Joel Schumacher's film, The Lost Boys, stands out not just because it's got a killer soundtrack, punk rock vamps, and the sweatiest saxophone player in cinema history. It's also a film that isn't so much about one young man's descent into vampirism, so much as it's about his little brother and his vampire-hunting buddies trying to save him. It's an unexpected bait-and-switch, one that remains charming due to the chemistry between Corey Haim's Sam and the "Frog Brothers," played by Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander. The fact that Sam and the les frères Frog are so much younger than Jason Patric's Michael and Kiefer Sutherland's David makes their clash at the end of the film that much more entertaining to watch. 

But as it turns out, the age gap between the characters in The Lost Boys wasn't the screenwriter's original intention. At The Lost Boys reunion panel at For The Love of Horror 2023, Kiefer Sutherland revealed, “All of [the vampire] characters were written originally much, much younger. They were to be played by 11, 12, 13-year-olds, and [director] Joel [Schumacher] changed that.”

In 1987, the iconic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon debuted - and all our lives were changed. Watch this reunion of the original voice actors:

Aging up the vampire characters in the film shifts the story's themes. Sam's grappling with his old brother Michael's newfound monstrosity can be read as a meditation on the horror of growing up. Speaking for myself at least, when you're a tween, older people in general can be terrifying, because you lack a social framework in which to understand them. I had no idea why teenagers were so loud and were always running around (and honestly, adult me still doesn't really understand either). In Sam's case, he's never known a time without his older brother around, and it makes Michael's departure from both the family home and his humanity a deeply unsettling experience for Sam. 

It's worth noting that Sutherland made these remarks in the context of a potential Lost Boys remake. Sutherland was open to the idea of someone remaking the film, and said that remaking it with the original ages of the characters would be an interesting take on the story. 

Get your wide-shoulder blouses and your Members-Only jackets, and go back in time with Popverse's Made in 87. Highlights include:

• Inside the chaotic rise and fall of The Lost Boys TV series that never made it to air
• How Bart Simpson was quietly toned down from being "so mean" before The Simpsons' first episode, as revealed by his long-time voice actor Nancy Cartwright
• Marvel Comics killed the X-Men in 1987 to reset the franchise - but it didn’t stick
• Why the Princess Bride’s iconic duel is an even better swordfight than you remember
• How The Golden Girls became a staple at gay bars in the 80s
• Inside Spider-Man’s chaotic 1987 bachelor party that Marvel turned into a real-life spectacle