Varsity Blues (1999)
Of course there's a bit of personal bias to my inflated take on
Varsity Blues , but it's in the details of this movie that go underappreciated:
I was a kid living in Texas when
Varsity Blues released. I took it for granted then, but when watching
Varsity Blues two decades later, it's impressive how many details are accurate to my 90s childhood experience of Texas High School Football:
-Parents waiting an additional year to enroll their boys in kindergarten so their physical builds were more matured and filled out for football once high school rolled around
-Friday Football pep rallies held in the gyms for the entire school to attend instead of classes
-Long lines of school busses and vehicle traffic caravanning together to other towns for road games
-Extensive local newspaper coverage of the high school football season topped by front page stories of standout players or high profile matchups, not only in smaller town papers but front page coverage for markets as large at Tyler (100k?) and Corpus Christi (300k?)
-Signs of the players posted in their yards. On my street several of our neighbors were home to varsity players. To kick off the season the cheerleading squad stopped by in their uniforms to post signs of specifically numbered jerseys in their front yards
-Season football highlights sold in VHS tapes at the local video rental store – I don’t remember this detail being the case; however, for Friday game nights, the local news added an additional half hour at the end of their 10 o’clock news to parade highlights and live updates from area wide football games
Of course,
Varsity Blues does not exist without Buzz Bissinger's non-fiction classic
Friday Night Lights which spawned the feature film (2004) and show (2006-11) of the same name.
Varsity Blues is able to dramatize what Bissinger's book does better than both the FNL film and show.
Before I say
Varsity Blues is a largely forgotten film by now, whenever I've visited Texas or college towns for football games in Auburn or Ames or Tempe wearing my West Canaan Coyotes t-shirt I'm often approached in the bars or at tailgates by people glad to say they "grew up on
Varsity Blues ." We'll exchange quotes.
It's a very quotable film, the characters are distinct, and like most 90s films, it's refreshing to see a movie take itself seriously before so many movies started becoming plagued by "irony" and an overly self-conscious self-awareness.
In that sense,
Varsity Blues is like most 90s films and thus never stood out. It's a Teen movie at a time when the Teen genre was oversaturated. It's a Sports movie at a time when the Sports genre was also oversaturated.
And for as much as I praise
Varsity Blues , I can admit to its few notoriously corny scenes:
VIDEO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zCpTNr2epA 
