The use of the soda can pull tab to ground the receiver to get a dial tone was my moment as I was a noob phreaker well before being a hacker. How many kids watching that movie would even know what was happening today? Would they even know what he picks up off the ground let alone the actual phreaking

Let alone the receiver. Or the concept of the pay phone as a whole.

And that actual "dial" on the phone...

I've never seen Hackers. It was War Games for me, too.

I love them both but they are entirely different. War Games was going for a degree of verisimilitude. Hackers is extremely stylized.

Because War Games didn't have Jolie in it. Maybe that? It was rather awful. A one-watcher.