LISTLESS: Underrated Teenage Heartthrobs, Part I

We discuss our teen crush deep-cuts, unattainable boyhood, Italians, Canadians, Italian-Canadians, and the non-threatening boy…

When deciding what we actually meant by “underrated teen heartthrobs,” an idea that seemed so vivid and clear before trying to actually write about it, we eventually settled on “guys we were interested in or did have crushes on during our childhood/teen years, or who we totally would have if we had access to more of their work, but we didn’t, because they weren’t household names,” and we kind of went from there.

[Emily]: Last month I watched The Boys Club, a 1996 coming-of-age drama directed by John Fawcett of Ginger Snaps fame. I was hooked immediately; in the opening credits, set to Archers of Loaf’s “Harnessed in Slums,” three teen boys bike through their small Canadian town, cutting into the woods to visit their oasis: a dilapidated shack housing their boombox, BB guns, and walls plastered with naked ladies. I am not a teenage boy, but I do believe I have the spirit of a teenage boy, and I gotta say, I can’t imagine a more beautiful place. But shit gets serious quick, and the idyllic setup morphs into a den of trouble almost immediately, because next time they visit it, a bleeding Chris Penn has invaded their shack, and he is NOT doing well. He befriends and manipulates the boys during some truly creepy scenes, and what follows is a pretty tense thriller with a killer soundtrack.

Devon Sawa is in The Boys Club. This is a Devon Sawa movie in 1996, post-Casper and -Now and Then, right before Wild America. This is pretty prime Devon time. And yet, when talk turns to Devon around me (seems to happen fairly often), no one ever mentions this one. Maybe because he’s not the main character.

The main Boy in The Boys Club is Dominic Zamprogna, my first pick for underrated teen heartthrob (underrated, at least, by American society, or those not in the soap opera community). He comes across as a “slightly mysterious, moody Italian boy,” which was my exact type of heartthrob when I was of heartthrob-pining age (see my teen obsession with James Franco as Daniel Desario from Freaks and Geeks, and see…the rest of this list).

This isn’t to say that he’s not successful. As an adult, he’s still got a long-running gig on General Hospital, and before that he was on Battlestar Galactica for a bit, but if you’re like me, you may remember him from Are You Afraid of the Dark? as the “Cutter’s Treasure” kid or, much more importantly, Jed from “The Tale of the Full Moon,” which appealed to me because it has 1950s aesthetics for some reason, and Jed is obsessed with getting a dog, which I was also obsessed with.

While researching for this, I found a lot of fun overlapping credits. The third Boy in The Boys Club is Stu Stone, who’s got a fascinating filmography (& discography), and who could very well fit into this list, and who I know from—you guessed it—Are You Afraid of the Dark? He’s the sick little brother in the one with Tatyana Ali.

I also came across Edgemont, the 70-episode, early 2000s half-hour Canadian high school drama that I would’ve been watching had it been shown in the States when I was a teen (it includes at least three other AYAOTD actors btw). Dominic stars as Mark Deosdade, and I think he’s great in it, mostly because he plays a pretty hard-to-read, morally-ambiguous main character who is maybe also sort of boring, but I think he’s just keeping his feelings inside because his parents are getting a divorce. Right away we think, is this guy going to cheat on his girlfriend, someone he’s known since childhood, with new girl Kristin Kreuk?

Molly and I have gotten hooked on the show. I wouldn’t say it’s “good” necessarily, but it makes me feel weird and kind of bad in a way I must like, because I’m nine episodes in. Something’s off about it; I don’t know if this changes as the seasons go on, but there are no adults at all so far, no teachers, parents, anyone older. And there are very few locations. We see school, a basement or a garage, and sometimes we’re at “Captain Java,” but we’re rarely in any actual living spaces. And Molly told me one of the main cast members died before the second season. What a strange, cursed little show.

It reminds me of Fifteen, another teen drama that aired on Nickelodeon from 1991 to 1993. It’s Canadian, too, but was called Hillside there. Ryan Reynolds is in it. Nickelodeon had two shows during this period that blend together in my memory, this and Welcome Freshmen, but Welcome Freshmen was a comedy, whereas Fifteen was so odd to me it gave me a nightmare. I don’t remember any details other than being scared, but I probably had it simply because I was watching a teen drama as a five-year-old. Something to do with a tone and look I wasn’t used to, which I think is just “daytime soap.” On Fifteen, you get brooding and knowing looks. Divorce talk. Rumors. No one laughs, and when there are jokes, they’re not funny. All the same stuff as Edgemont.

I asked one of my Canadian friends (thanks, Kirsti!) about Dominic, and about Edgemont specifically, and she has no memory of it, despite it being on for a couple of years, pointing me towards Breaker High instead. Wow. You guys ever hear of this? Breaker High is nuts. Breaker High rules. They go to high school on a cruise ship. There’s only one season, but anecdotally it seems to have made more of a…splash 😈 (sorry, please don’t unsubscribe).

Indulge me for a sec: in this pic we’ve got Scott Vickaryous (astounding, wonderful name if I’m pronouncing it correctly) who was in Whatever It Takes (watched heavily during my Franco years). And Tyler Labine and Gosling, who were both in Are You Afraid of the Dark? along with Kyle Alisharan there in the blue hat, who was in THE SAME Tatyana Ali ep as Stu Stone, and who is real-life brothers with the guy who played bad-boy Midnight Society member Frank.

So: where is the Tiger Beat issue with Dominic Zamprogna on the cover? I think this is likely some Canadian/US thing I hadn’t ever really thought about, like the only reason he didn’t reach Devon-level heartthrob status was because he didn’t break through in the US at that age like some other Canadian It Boys (Devon obv, Ryan Reynolds I guess, Joshua Jackson, Hayden Christiansen, Corey Haim, Ryan Gosling, Keanu).

But he landed covers eventually:

Like I mentioned earlier, he’s a big deal on General Hospital and I’m sure his years on Edgemont helped him hone his craft. He plays Dante Falconeri. Dante Falconeri! An undercover cop investigating his father, a mob boss! He has PTSD! He was brainwashed!

Soap operas and Canada remain enigmas to me, but thanks to Dominic, I think I’m finally ready to unravel their mysteries.

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[Molly]: Last week, I found a VHS copy of the Sean Astin-led coming-of-age action film Toy Soldiers from 1991 at the bad Goodwill that I only go to if I’m like, right there anyway. It’s a rental copy so the cardboard sleeve is sliced at the edges and retrofitted into a clear plastic clamshell case. It was rented, according to the stickers inside, from a Boston Stop & Shop. An automatic purchase for me.

I watched Toy Soldiers only once before this. I was in high school—a time in my life when fictional boyhood was the most appealing category of art to me. Making up secret handshakes, hocking loogies, insulting each other’s mothers, hiding porno magazines under the mattress, creating general teenage havoc, etc. I yearned to hang with the boys. But really, I think I just wanted that kind of belonging and unconditional acceptance. At this point in my adolescence though, I had exhausted all the Stand by Mes and Goonies and was moving on to the next level of the loss-of-innocence-sad-teen-boy iceberg. Toy Soldiers, I would say, is B-tier in terms of popularity.

The movie takes place at an all-boys boarding school that’s raided by a group of Colombian terrorists who hold everyone hostage. But the plot didn’t exactly stick with me over the years. (Sorry to David Koepp who is apparently the ninth most successful screenwriter of all time.) I only remembered a few things that were important to me at the time: Wil Wheaton’s dangling earring, extended scenes of everyone in their underwear—like, bikini-cut brief underwear, lots of bare thighs, and Keith Coogan, my first entry to this list.

You may be asking yourself, how can Keith Coogan, Teen Beat’s Hunk of the Month himself, be an underrated heartthrob? Well, even though he’s a fairly well-known teen idol in expert circles, I feel as if we need a bigger spotlight on him and his oeuvre. He’s done the work, GOOD work. So good, in fact, that you’d never say, “Hey, Keith Coogan is just famous because his grandfather was Uncle Fester.” No, he’s famous because his performances were indelible to American society.

In Toy Soldiers, the first time we see Coogan’s character (fittingly named Snuffy Bradberry), he’s in the background, but you’re looking at him. Why? Because not only is he actively picking his nose, he’s the only student not wearing gym clothes. He’s in some yuppie khaki ensemble.

You know practically everything about his character from this one shot. This is star-making stuff!

And he continues to stand out. In a sea of ripped denim, tie dye, and a Taco Bell-colored rainbow of purple, pink, and teal hues that are somehow neon and pastel at the same time, there he is. Normcore from head to toe. Sockless in boat shoes.

I believe he is the most interesting character in the main group of boys. And yes, this includes Wil Wheaton’s Joey Trotta, son of Jerry Orbach’s Albert Trotta AKA the head of the New Jersey mafia for some reason.

Snuffy Bradberry’s backstory is not entirely mysterious. We’re given breadcrumbs throughout the film and we can easily fill in the blanks. His dad’s a Republican big wig. He’s perpetually-ill and has asthma. He smokes a lot and currently attends a school made up of mostly dropouts and troublemakers. From this, we can ascertain that he’s a disappointment to his dad who probably shipped him off to boarding school the first chance he got. And, that Snuffy probably wants to be like his dad, to make him proud. But deep down, he knows he can’t, so he just keeps fucking up.

He’s clearly complicated. All the other boys are too, don’t get me wrong. But unlike the others, Snuffy Bradberry is, at least in my 15-year-old brain, attainable and, most importantly, safe. And in some primordial part of myself, being safe is key to my survival—even in my subconscious fictional teenage fantasies. Sean Astin’s Billy or Wil Wheaton’s Joey might hurt me. Snuffy Bradberry? Not a chance.

And Coogan brings that same level of wholesomeness to Kenny in Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead, a heavily-rotated childhood sleepover movie in my house. A metalhead Spicoli, a leather-jacket wearing Bill and Ted, Kenny is pure and harmless—a force of chaotic good. Kenny was a very important character for me in my formative years and probably my favorite of the Coogans I’ve seen.

I’m still working my way through his filmography, but I’ve yet to see him not bring a similar energy to each role (except when he played a child molester in that Lifetime movie about the two Coreys, but I’m counting that as an outlier).

I know that he still acts, he goes to cons, and that as of 2024, he gives tours of the Sony lot. I don’t know him, but it seems that maybe art imitates life here. From the limited¹ social media of his that I’ve seen, it seems he’s just a wholesome guy. He loves his wife, his family, and of course, movies. A real California boy-next-door, Keith Coogan. My forever hunk of the month.

1. After reading some horrendous takes from another teen idol on Twitter, I’ve developed a kind of don’t-meet-your-heroes mentality and try to avoid following celebs who are important to me in an effort to maintain blissful ignorance.