Whilst he is probably best known for his genre-defining 1980s teenage comedies such as The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sixteen Candles, Weird Science and Pretty in Pink, he was also responsible for producing and writing Vacation, a Chevy Chase comedy, Uncle Buck, Home Alone, Home Alone 2: Lost In New York and Home Alone 3, virtually a live-action cartoon strip featuring a young boy mistakenly left at home using all manner of tricks to painfully foil two inept thieves. In the process, he made Macaulay Culkin one of the richest children on the planet.
Hughes's "teen flicks" are generally viewed notably above the quantities of dross produced in the genre by treating teenagers as complex, three-dimensional beings, and prodded the social hierarchies of the high school.