1980's Movie Bullies

By Josh Bacott
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(For more stuff by Josh check his site out at www.joesportsfan.com)

Whatever happened to the good old fashioned Hollywood high school bully?

It was a staple of the 80’s movie, where the bully or gang of bullies would strap on their fingerless weight lifting gloves and beat up on the less popular kids until the nerds were able to exact some exotic form of revenge.

Nowadays, the bully character perfected in the 80’s has become non-existent.

It appears as if some of the events of the past years have Hollywood shying away from this type of storyline. Revenge of the Nerds might not have been such a breezy comedy if Louis and Gilbert donned hooded sweatshirts and went to the Alpha Beta house with shotguns blazing.

So it seems that with the passing of the 80’s, the era of the movie bully had officially ended. But that won’t stop us from paying tribute to those that blazed the trails in this field.

The following is the list of the elite movie bullies throughout the decade of the 1980’s, when they reigned supreme. Each of them, in their own right, showed us what it was like to genuinely take pride in nerd-pounding.

Stan Gable (Revenge of the Nerds)- Ted McGinley brought to life this preppy, college bully, who oozed machismo even though from first glance he looked like a potential third member of Wham!. He dated the head cheerleader and was the captain of the football team, making him one of the more traditional movie bullies, despite the surfer boy image. College aged bullies are hard to come by, as the transition from high school to college gives nerds a chance to reinvent themselves into more socially accepted versions of themselves. Gable did his part to make sure that the bully continued to reign supreme as long as possible.

Ogre (Revenge of the Nerds) - Gable’s sidekick in Nerds, Ogre was the muscle of the Alpha Beta goon squad. Throughout his career, he racked up an impressive resume of nerd beatings. He brought with him a refreshing passion for his trade and an uncanny ability to spot potential targets from miles away, not to mention his legendary obsession with spraying beer all over the face of innocent bystanders. Ogre’s style, with the sleeveless letter jacket, the wild hair, the constant shrieking of “Neerrrddddssss!!!”, was a perfect compliment to Gable’s calculating superiority.

Mick McAllister (Teen Wolf)- Mick was the only bully on the list that went toe-to-toe with a non-human nerd. For that reason, he is considered an elite bully. He showed no fear when faced with the prospect of throwing fists with a wild animal in a Beaver’s basketball jersey aka Scott Howard aka Michael J. Fox dressed up like a wolf. It takes a man to do that. He even taunted the Wolf, calling him a “freak,” on numerous occasions. If facing up to and taunting the Wolf wasn’t enough, we get one last chance to see Mick’s pure intimidation at work when he is inexplicably allowed to loom under the basket scouring at Scotty Howard as he takes the game winning free throws in the final scene. The only logical explanation for this was that Mick was simply so bad, and so intimidating that the referee was too frightened to challenge it.

Biff Tannen (Back to the Future)- The man responsible for making the name Biff a regular part of American dialect, Tannen served as a variety of bullies in the Back to the Future trilogy. In all fairness, any bully could have picked on George McFly, he was one of the nerdiest characters in movie history, but Tannen was able to perfect the role in multiple forms. He was a young, high school bully, middle-aged bully, old man bully, casino tycoon bully, futuristic bully, 50’s bully, and he nailed all of them.

Buddy Revelle (Three O’Clock High)- Revell is a definite front runner for “the baddest high schooler on the planet” due mostly in part to his work in the movie Three O’Clock High. Buddy didn’t date a cheerleader and didn’t play sports; he got his varsity letter in ass kicking. In the movie, he schedules a fight with school twerp, Jerry Mitchell, at 3:00 sharp on his first day at the school. As a warm-up for the main event, Revell whips a school security guard, the reigning school tough guy and the principal. Not too shabby for a days work. Buddy barely speaks in the movie, but he is instantly recognizable as the type of guy that you avoid in high school. His eventual loss in the Mitchell fight was simply due to the combination of brass knuckles and Hollywood propaganda.

William Zabka- The lone bully on the list that can be instantly identified by his real name. Zabka = bully. What Miles Davis was to jazz, William Zabka was to movie bullies. He was the king of tough guys, the worst enemy to those on the low end of the popularity food chain. In three consecutive years, Zabka put his ‘A’ game onto the big screen for all of America to enjoy. His legacy started in 1984 in the movie The Karate Kid, with his historic portrayal of Johnny Lawrence, the top student in the Cobra Kai dojo who made it his life’s work to torture Daniel LaRusso, the gawky new kid. He ran the school, because everyone knew that if they screwed with him, he would plant a spinning roundhouse on their temple. The image of Johnny Lawrence in his Cobra Kai karate outfit would be the cover shot on the Hollywood bully handbook.

If that wasn’t enough, he dazzled us again twelve months later with another fine depiction of a high school bully. Greg Tolan was the bully in the movie Just One of the Guys, a film about a girl who acts like a boy to win a journalism contest. Tolan demonstrated his dominance by walking around all day with weight lifting gloves on and lifting “tulips” by their pants to work out his triceps. As the main character found out, transvestite journalists weren’t exempt from his wrath.

Finally, in 1986, William took his acting ability to the limits when he accepted a role as a bully who was also on the diving team in Back to School. Make a diver a tough guy? Impossible right? Not when it’s placed in the hands of a true mastermind. Chazz Osbourne was the character and Zabka did what he always did, made it believable. Sadly, after this feature Zabka’s career went downhill. His later roles included Shootfighter I & II, High Voltage (as a character named “Mad Dog,”) Python 2 and, most recently, alongside superstar Antonio Sabato in Hypersonic.

The days of the Hollywood bully may be behind us, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t look to these six individuals to remind us of a simpler time - a time when nerds were nerds and bullies were the popular guys who beat the crap out of them every day.

I can’t help but to think that the world might be a better place if everyone were just a little more like Zabka.