A fellow hubber emailed me and asked when the tribute to Chicago's greatest filmmaker was coming. An odd email considering I had just considered making this hub only an hour before the email arrived. I have made a couple of hubs dedicated to John Hughes' film world, the one we all wanted to live and play in. It seemed that a final hub - an ode to the man - was only fitting.

John's films made life just a little bit easier. They made us laugh. They made us cry. We quoted them endlessly. They never grew old and though John is now gone from this world, he continues to live on. You can find him in Shermer, Illinois, walking the halls of Shermer High and whispering in the ear of some neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie, giving him an inexplicable urge to take a day off.

If you're like me, you spent most of your adolescence quoting his films. If you're *really* like me, you probably quoted some of them just last week.

John's "teen angst" films - The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off - made it feel as if he was "with us" instead of just talking at us. The genre that he popularized was emulated many times. However, it was never duplicated. No one had quite his touch.

His films didn't stop with just the teen angst. He brought humor into our lives through many characters. Uncle Buck. Planes, Trains and Automobiles. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Home Alone.

He was important to us because we came to know his characters as well as we did our own family. Most of us have spent as much time with them as we would an old friend. We know them by name and, better yet, we understand them just as he understood us.

John was important to us because he "got us." He understood that we wanted to be both entertained and moved.