I’ve always found it strange that so many children of the mid-80′s define their lives around Speilberg movies like the Indiana Jones trilogy, Goonies, ET, or the Back to the Future series. I mean, those movies were all aimed at tweens, teens, and young adults. If you were born in the 80′s, you were not the target audience for those movies – you probably didn’t see them until a few years after the movies were actually released. So you probably first experienced these “80′s movies” in the mid-90′s.

Personally, when I think of my formative years, I think of The Lion King. Released in 1994 when I was 10, The Lion King was the first movie I can remember asking my parents to take me to see. With a plot strongly influenced by Hamlet, The Lion King was the first movie I saw with really mature (scary!) themes. Unlike Spielberg’s 80′s movies, The Lion King consciously addressed the question of its viewers’ place as successors to their parents – the movie asks us to question whether or not we, as children of the 80′s, are really prepared to guide the next 40 years of American (and global) policy.