Brian Truitt

USA TODAY

The summer of 1984 was a rough one for Tim League, who says at 14 he was the spitting image of actor Anthony Michael Hall, the skinny, dorky, brace-faced, redheaded teenager in the John Hughes comedy Sixteen Candles.

So after the movie arrived in May, League says he spent the next few months having people tell him he looked just like that Sixteen Candles kid, "which is not a compliment."

While things were bad outside the movie theater, inside League — today founder and CEO of Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas — was having his mind blown with a season full of influential hits, many of which have become classics in the subsequent 30 years.

The supernatural comedy Ghostbusters ruled the summer, spending eight weeks as the top movie in the country and racking up more box-office receipts than any other movie in the calendar year. (Beverly Hills Cop, which came out in December, wound up the top-grossing film released in 1984, though, with just over $5 million more than Ghostbusters' monster $229 million take.)

A new generation of film fans like League learned the bad things that happened when you got a Mogwai wet and fed one after midnight in the horror flick Gremlins. Plus, they got their own Rocky story with The Karate Kid. Bonus points if you were 13 — PG-13 was introduced in 1984; the first movie to use it was the Cold War action thriller Red Dawn.

Meanwhile, Harrison Ford was in the globetrotting sequel Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, rock god Prince went big time with the music-fueled Purple Rain, Tom Hanks threw one heck of a ribald Bachelor Party, and geeks faced off with jocks and cheerleaders in Revenge of the Nerds.

"If you Google a list and just see all the movies that came out in 1984, they're classics and they define that decade," says Adam F. Goldberg, creator and executive producer of ABC's The Goldbergs, a semi-autobiographical sitcom about his childhood in the '80s.

Special effects were taking huge leaps, too, in the likes of The Last Starfighter and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, says Jordan Hoffman, Trek expert and movie writer for Film.com and New York's Daily News. "There were Ray Harryhausen movies in the '50s, but there was nothing like Temple of Doom."

One of the most intriguing aspects of these movies for Goldberg was how they set a template for sequels and reboots, from more Indiana Jones and Star Trek movies to remakes of Bachelor Party and Red Dawn to third installments of Ghostbusters and Gremlins now in development.

"That was the summer," Goldberg says. "They were making the franchises of today."

Some highlights from the cinematic summer of '84:

Cobra Kai never dies

The Karate Kid's Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and his journey from bullied teen to champ of the All-Valley Karate Tournament sent all sorts of kids running to their nearest martial-arts center to learn the crane kick.

Over the years, however, the black-clad blackbelts of the Cobra Kai have become villains that moviegoers love to hate.

"People relate to the mantra of 'There's no pain in this dojo.' That's probably why," Goldberg quips.

Cobra Kai's smarmy blond leg-sweeping leader was Johnny Lawrence, played by Billy Zabka, who parlayed the part into bad-guy roles in Just One of the Guys (1985) and Back to School (1986). A key player as himself in the recent final season of How I Met Your Mother, Zabka also was nominated for a live-action short-film Oscar in 2004.

"If you had a bad guy, you had to go to Billy Zabka," Goldberg says. "He was a legend."

Spock's return in Star Trek III

When Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan seemingly killed off Leonard Nimoy's Mr. Spock, most fans were aghast — though not Nimoy, who was pretty tired of playing the character, according to Hoffman.

"But if you're going to get killed," he says, "put him on a planet that is reconfiguring itself on a molecular basis thanks to the Genesis device."

The end of Khan left his return open, and Spock indeed was resurrected when Nimoy struck a deal to come back if Paramount would let him direct Star Trek III. He also directed the successful Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home two years later, as well as Three Men and a Baby.

"He was able to get a little second career out of it," Hoffman says, "all because of his shrewd handling of him not wanting to be Spock again."

As Captain Kirk, William Shatner is famous for being a ham, but the third Star Trek film gave him a chance to do an emotional scene where he learns his son is dead. "He can be a very touching actor," Hoffman says. "That has to be interplay between him and Leonard because they've known each other for so long."

A true revenge of the Nerds

Revenge of the Nerds was a real underdog story: The geeky science-loving Tri-Lambs — played by Robert Carradine, Anthony Edwards, Curtis Armstrong and others — take on the jocks, coaches and cool kids of Adams College and win the day.

In the real life of 1984, nerds were still outcasts, but nowadays the movie seems like foreshadowing of the age of the Internet, today's comic-book superhero movies and the success of Apple and Amazon.

"I was nerdy, and it was obviously this work of pure fantasy that the nerds could ever have popularity or win," League says. But "it seems totally reasonable now, because the nerds have in fact won."

One of Goldberg's first screenwriting gigs in Hollywood was a more modern Revenge of the Nerds franchise reboot, which was shut down during production in 2006.

While the nerds of the first movie felt shame about their interests, "there was a more brazen geek pride" to the remake, Goldberg recalls. "I still think it's probably the best script I've ever written."

How Indy whipped up the PG-13 rating

When Red Dawn was released on Aug. 10, 1984, it marked the first time a movie was tagged with the new PG-13 rating, strongly cautioning parents that material may be suited for teenagers and older. (It is now the most frequent rating films garner, with PG-13 movies holding six of the top-10-grossing movies of all time.)

Moms and dads of the time probably would have liked it to be around a few months earlier, when the violence and gore of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom sent them into enough of an overprotective tizzy that director Steven Spielberg suggested a new rating as a happy medium between kid-friendly PG and adult-oriented R.

"We had never seen eyeball soup, we had never seen a snake you cut open and other snakes come out of it. And the bug room! For a 10-year-old boy, that was just hitting that pleasure center in the brain," Hoffman says.

However, he adds that he had to hide his eyes during the ritual sacrifice when villainous high priest Mola Ram ripped a guy's heart out and the organ then burst into flames. "I had nightmares about that scene."

It terrified Goldberg, too, the TV creator says, and he couldn't escape it even at home. "My brother used to hold me down and say the chant and stick his hands into my chest as a torture."