My Girl

Columbia Pictures released My Girl on November 27, 1991, and director Howard Zieff — working from Laurice Elehwany's screenplay — somehow made a childhood spent inside a funeral home feel tender instead of grim. Anna Chlumsky, in her first major film role, played Vada Sultenfuss, a hypochondriac kid growing up above her widowed father's funeral parlor; Dan Aykroyd played her dad Harry, Jamie Lee Curtis played Shelly, the new arrival who upends the household, and Macaulay Culkin — already the most famous kid in America after Home Alone — played Thomas J. Sennett, Vada's loyal, allergic-to-everything best friend.

Then the beehive. Vada and Thomas J. knock a hive down in the woods, and Vada loses her mood ring in the scramble. Thomas J. goes back alone to find it. The hive is still active, and he is killed by the bees — he was allergic. The funeral scene that follows is seared into the memory of everyone who watched it young: a movie marketed on bicycle-riding summer sweetness turning, without warning, into a first lesson in grief. Ask anyone who saw it at a sleepover; they can still tell you exactly where they were sitting.

Audiences showed up anyway — or maybe because. Filmed in Bartow and Sanford, Florida, in early 1991, the film grossed $121 million worldwide on a $17 million budget, and a sequel, My Girl 2, followed in 1994. But it's the first film that stayed lodged in the culture: the mood ring, the weeping, and the discovery that a PG family movie could be the most devastating thing you'd ever seen.