YMMV / The Secret of My Success

• Awesome Music: Like most movies from the 80s, this movie has several top acts of the era, with their songs prominently featured in the movie itself. Standout acts include Katrina and the Waves, Pat Benatar, and Night Ranger performing the title song, and the use of Yello's "Oh Yeah" being one of the highlights of the film.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The movie came out several months before the stock market crash of October 19, 1987.
• Retroactive Recognition: Cindy Crawford appears as one of the models in the opening montage.
• Spiritual Successor: Thanks to it being an '80s comedy starring Michael J. Fox as a Wall Street yuppie, it's been described as an unofficial sequel to Family Ties about Alex P. Keaton's grown-up adventures in the world of finance.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Brantley can pull off his con because he works in the mail room, which gives him access to the internal mail system; he learns everything he does about the company by reading public and private memos. If the movie had occurred just a few years later, e-mail would have made this impossible.
  • The fact that there are still landlines at the office and at Brantley's apartment and public phone booths also dates the film. Today, most people carry smartphones and tablets.
• Values Dissonance: A major subplot in the movie that has incest being played for laughs might raise a few eyebrows today.
• Values Resonance:
  • Brantley being forced to work a menial position he is unqualified for has become very relatable with the Great Recession and the recent scandals involving for-profit colleges making people question the motto that college guarantees a good job.
  • One of the plot points is Howard, Brantley's uncle, running Pemrose into the ground with his yuppie outlook. Since the late 20th century, many major corporations like Enron and Lehman Brothers have been run into the ground by people like Howard.

---