Let's take a journey back in time, back before YouTube, The OC, gross-out comedy, Judd Apatow and High School Musicals.

It's the mid-1980s, post- modern irony has yet to be invented and one man is creating the movies and soundtrack for a generation.

Ferris Bueller is about to have a day off, Molly Ringwald looks pretty in pink and a bunch of grumpy teens in an anytown US high school will somehow speak for their angst and acne-ridden brethren on our side of the Atlantic.

The man in question is writer/director John Hughes.

And the teen movies he made, which have just been given the box-set treatment, helped define the times for everybody who grew up in the '80s.

Hughes was directly responsible for the teen movie classics Sixteen Candles, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Pretty In Pink and The Breakfast Club.

The Chicago-born teen-movie auteur introduced a new generation of young actors who would form the nucleus of the Brat Pack and star in other '80s classics such as St Elmo's Fire, About Last Night and Say Anything.

Most, like Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall, Molly Ringwald and Emilio Estevez, struggled to sustain their success once out of their teens.

A few, like Ferris Bueller star Matthew Broderick, would have long careers but would never again get the kind of roles Hughes offered them in their teens.

The soundtracks would make songs like Simple Minds' Don't You Forget About Me and Pretty In Pink (from obscure English New Wavers Psychedelic Furs) classic songs of the decade.

And after ruling the '80s (Hughes also scripted Planes, Trains & Automobiles and Home Alone) he would virtually retire from making movies, tired of the relentless dumbing-down of Hollywood.

Now virtually a recluse, in movie business terms at least, Hughes is today cited as a major influence by the likes of Clerks director Kevin Smith and current teen movie king Judd Apatow.

"John Hughes wrote some of the great outsider characters of all time," says Apatow, the writer-director-producer behind movies including The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Superbad, Knocked Up and Pineapple Express.

"It's pretty ridiculous to hear people talk about the movies we've been doing, with outrageous humour and sweetness all combined, as if they were an original idea.

"I mean, it was all there first in John Hughes' films.

"Whether it's Freaks and Geeks or Superbad, the whole idea of having outsiders as the lead characters, that all started with Hughes."

Now approaching his sixties, Hughes is regarded by the likes of Apatow and fellow director Kevin Smith (of Clerks and Jay and Silent Bob fame), as the great lost talent of American film.

"He's our generation's J.D. Salinger," says Smith, whose film Dogma shows its heroes, Jay and Silent Bob, on a pilgrimage to Shermer, Illinois, a mythical town that only exists in Hughes' films.

"He touched a generation and then the dude checked out. If it weren't for him, I wouldn't be doing what I do. Basically my stuff is just John Hughes films with four-letter words."

Hughes quit directing in 1991, moved home to Chicago in 1995 and has hardly been heard from since.

Smith says whenever he's in Chicago promoting a film he asks his local publicist if they know how to find him, to no avail.

The release of the new DVD box set; John Hughes' High School Year Book, has prompted a reappraisal of his '80s movies including his best, The Breakfast Club.

Hughes' best loved and most influential teen saga was recently named the Top High School Movie of All Time by Entertainment Weekly magazine.

That may be unfair to contenders like Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, Apatow's Superbad or American Graffiti. However, The Breakfast Club was one of those rare movies that define a time and a place for a generation of young people.

Set in Hughes' fictional town of Sherman, it's the story of five teenagers suffering through nine hours of detention in their school library on a dreary Saturday.

Virtually all of the story takes place within the four walls of the library and the entire film consists of conversations and confrontations between the five teenagers.

Compared to the slapstick, gross-out style of later teen movies like American Pie and Superbad, Breakfast Club is almost Ingmar Bergman-does-teen-movie.

And the teenagers look like actual, real teenagers (as opposed to the airbrushed, genetic one-offs of Disney's High School Musicals).

Redheads Molly Ringwald and nerdy Anthony Michael Hall star alongside basket case Ally Sheedy, badboy Judd Nelson and insecure jock Emilio Estevez.

They are dressed badly (even for '80s kids) and trade stories of heartbreak, parental neglect and angst with dialog that wouldn't be out of place in a Woody Allen movie.

When the school principal (the only adult in the movie) asks Nelson's badboy character about a broken door, the teen replies: "Screws fall out all of the time, the world's an imperfect place."

And then there's the movie's most famous line: "When you grow up, your heart dies."

Try putting that line into High School Musical or Dude, Where's My Car?

Hughes now says he got away with a lot precisely because Hollywood didn't expect much from teen movies before he arrived to change the game.

"At the time I came along, Hollywood's idea of teen movies meant there had to be a lot of nudity, usually involving boys in pursuit of sex, and pretty gross overall," said Hughes recently in a rare interview to mark the release of the box set.

"It was either that or a horror movie.

"And the last thing Hollywood wanted in their teen movies was teenagers! I mean, look at them -- it was all 25-year-olds in those movies.

"When I did Sixteen Candles, all the extras, the kids on the bus and in the gym, they were all real freshmen boys and girls from the same high school.

"Anthony Michael Hall was a freshman, the 16-year-olds were actual 15-year-olds, except for Molly, who was a year younger.

"You may not realise it now, but it had never really happened before."

Hughes decided to stop making movies because he got "tired of the huge blockbuster effects".

"I always liked character stories best -- put two or more people in a room and get them talking, that's the whole reason I got into this in the first place."

"And one of the bits of wisdom I've picked up about adolescence is that joy and sorrow are equally pleasant to a teenager; those extreme states of mind are pretty cool whatever they are!"

The many fans of John Hughes will tell you that movies like Breakfast Club could never get made in today's Hollywood, a place where teens are simply a commodity to exploit and not much else.

Take a fresh look at Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller's Day Off today, and you get the feeling that today's teens -- for all of their dominance of pop culture -- are getting short-changed.

Hughes' Greatest Hits

Sixteen Candles (1984)

Awkward high school sophomore Samantha "Sam" Baker (Molly Ringwald) struggles to get through the day of her sixteenth birthday, which her entire family forgets because her older sister, Ginny is getting married the next day.

She is also plagued by her ongoing infatuation with the very popular and very attractive senior, Jake, while ignoring the geeky but lovable nerd Ted (Anthony Michael Hall).

Will Sam's parents remember her birthday? And will she get to kiss Jake before she blows out those sixteen candles?

Classic Soundtrack Song: Happy Birthday -- Altered Images.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)

Supercool high school kid Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick, bottom right) decides to take a day off school and help his friend Cameron deal with some unresolved issues with his father.

One crashed Ferrari later, Cameron is ready to deal with his dad and even Bueller's sister ready to cut him some slack.

Classic Soundtrack Song: Oh Yeah -- Yello.

The Breakfast Club (1985)

Five very different teens are forced to spend an entire Saturday in detention in their school library.

They pour their hearts out to each other and discover they have a lot more in common with each other than they thought.

Classic Soundtrack Song: Don't You Forget About Me -- Simple Minds.

- Joe O’Shea