One of the very few films to actually take bullying seriously

No joke, this film does want the other 5,000,000+ Hollywood films fail to do; take bullying seriously and not as a joke, a bad cliché stereotype, or a plot device. It's amazing that just a decade later, bullying got worse in films. It just doesn't feel right that the 80s did a better job with bullies than the 90s did. The latter decade treated it like a very bad cliché that was (no pun intended) a bad punching bag to tell cheap ass conflicts for children's films. Like no joke, they made it a lot worse in the 90s. The bullies were just AWFUL. At least the 80s had memorable bullies like Biff Tannen, Johnny Lawrence, and Scut Farkus. The 90s had some of the worst bullies in the history of cinema and they were just bad plot stereotypes, not even real characters. Hell, they were not even important to the film and taking them out would change nothing (like removing them from the opening to Jumanji) and Hollywood just got lazy and made them straight up assholes with nothing charming about them. Yes, bullies are supposed to be assholes, but the ones from the 80s were "so bad they were good" and they had charming traits. The ones from the 90s and 2000s were just so bad they were awful and forgettable. Sometimes they would beat up a kid and nothing was done about them and they became "Karma Houdinis" and that's not cool at all. The films from the 80s were nothing like that. Not trying to go all "Barney & Friends" here by saying that these conflicts should have happy endings, but considering real life is nothing like that; it would be a decent enough excuse to make the conflicts get resolved and not end with nothing being resolved where nobody learning their lessons.

Hollywood forgot to write bullies after the 80s. Yes, even back in that decade, they still existed as bad stereotypes. A lot of sitcoms from that decade used them in TV shows like Different Strokes and The Wonder Years where they were just lazy stereotypes because kids needed an antagonist as an obstacle that interfered with their school life, but that's all they were; just an obstacle. At least the bully in Different Strokes was a slient, unseen bully who beats up his victims and never spoke. It's kinda like how the original Friday The 13th had an unseen killer who murdered everyone and wasn't revealed until the 3rd act. I never grew up in the 80s. I was born in 1988 and grew up in the 90s when bullies were more poorly written sterotypes. This whole bullies becoming "bad generic sterotypes" wasn't as big as a problem until the 90s, even if the problem still had existed back in the 80s. It only got worse.

Yes, there were still bad bully sterotypes, that even existed in 80s films. Take The Garbage Pail Kids Movie for example. However, that's the least of the film's many problems and like I said, it was more of a problem in mainstream films from the 90s than the 80s. Again, it only got worse in the following decade. The 90s are to the 60s what the 80s were to the 50s; a much sinister and darker decade, in contrast to their more nicer, colorful predecessor.