1967 hardcover first edition release.

1997 rerelease cover to The Outsiders.

The Outsiders as a book and as a movie still hold up strong, even if some people continue to see it as a story bringing up the concerns of social class levels. For the book, it is still used in several schools. Many don’t accept it because of the violence, alcohol and drugs, and how it portrayed family life, but there are still many who do use it for teachings. On the books 30th anniversary, it was rereleased with a new cover that contains art renderings of some of the characters in the story as the actors who played them in the film. It’s still one of the best-selling young adult novels today, and will be exactly 50 years old of release on April 24, 2017. And it continues to be loved by teenagers for it paints their emotions in a similar light, and they find the characters and their emotions relatable, even if their actions are not.

The reception to The Outsiders as a film is a mixed bag. At the box office, the film grossed around triple of its budget, but it has since then received much backlash for not representing the book enough. The emotion and cause behind several actions and scenes tha were detailed in the book were never really understood by those watching those scenes translated to the big screen. Characters didn’t have the same drive and their attitude and actions felt too one sided, so the characters of Ponyboy, Steve Randle (Tom Cruise), and Cherry (Diane Lane) come off as flat and uninteresting to the viewers. Not to mention scene were cut and fans of the book complained there was too much of the story missing from the film.

That last criticism is what drove Coppola to edit back in scenes cut from the original film and then release the longer version titled The Outsiders: The Complete Novel, now with almost a half hour of extra content, in 2005 and again in 2011. And these scenes add on to the struggles between the Socs and adults, contributing to the original reasoning behind the story’s creation, along with adding some of the narration and showing Ponyboy as the main character of the film more blatantly. The director’s cut, as this version is, has been well received, especially when addressing a lot of the concerns fans had for the first version about characters and their drives and actions. The story was filled more from what the novel had, the characters were given more and important scenes that didn’t make it to the first showing in ’83, and the struggles these boys faced were brought into a brighter light.