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This week on GLoP, it’s the 40th anniversary of the release of Animal House, one of the most important movies in the GLoP Character Universe (The GLoPCU, if you will). But lately, this great American movie is under attack for well, not being “woke” enough, like some sort of cinematic Confederate statue. But don’t worry, the Men of GLoP® are here to save the day and defend the movie from a societal fatal kiln explosion . Also, is collusion a crime? And on the occasion of Mission Impossible: Fallout‘s giant opening, we list our favorite Tim Cruise movies. Or try to.
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So much irony. The envelope has been pushed so hard and so far that there is no envelope anymore. Too bad so many of our good institutions really were rotten and unable to hold up the structure against the comedic probing and tuning.
To make matters worse, some people are hard at work building a new envelope and the Lampoons will be put up against the wall too (perhaps first). Chesterton’s fence principle applies.
Not really true. The window of allowable content has actually narrowed in the last 20 years, and many of the more unPC aspects of ANIMAL HOUSE would never make it to the screen today.
What is more permissible today is gross, bodily-function humor featuring all manner of waste products and icky fluids. It’s the kind of not-very-clever humor a 10 year old boy could write.
But smart, edgy, unPC humor? A thing of the past.
Comedies now are PC and pee-yoo.
Right. As I say there are people building a new envelope that none of us like. The Lampoons might be the first to be purged in the new structure.
Ha ha! I love that stuff. :-)
In a fit of pique, I sometimes think of quitting my job and devoting myself to creating a podcast of such quality and interest that it attracts millions, solely to then be able to book Vic, Jonathan, and Sonny as guests and then spend the entire show boring them to death about places in and around Phoenix I remember as a kid growing up there. And I’d throw in a long digression about traffic and my commute in the S.F. Bay Area for good measure. An expensive form of revenge, sure, but it would be satisfying.
Why no mention of Blazing Saddles?
Several years ago, a local independent (non-network) broadcast station ran Blazing Saddles on a Sunday night. I was surprised to find it was uncensored. Except maybe for some of the S-words. I don’t remember that for sure now.
The next day I called the station to compliment them, and the person I talked to said they had only received positive calls.
Of course, that would never happen now.
The discussion on Animal House brought back some memories. I first watched that movie, uh motion picture, about 9 months after it was released in, of all places, Inglewood, California. For those that don’t know, Inglewood is a small city in Los Angeles County, and it’s not exactly the best of neighborhoods in the LA area. It wasn’t back then either. The reason Animal House was still in theaters, was at the time, they would limit the prints, and first run movies, uh motion pictures, and there was a kind of tier system as to when a theater would receive a first run motion picture. First run motion pictures took about a year to distribute, and those of us who grew up in rural areas were well aware of that delay.
The reason I was in Inglewood was that I was in the process of enlisting in the U.S. Coast Guard, and they had one of their recruiting stations there. I suddenly had some time on my hands, so I crossed the street and watched Animal House.
It was a weekday, and the movie theater was mostly empty. Early on in the motion picture, there’s a scene where Bluto (John Belushi) urinates in a bush (someone hiding ends up getting peed on). It was at that point that two people in the back of the theater urinated in the theater. I don’t remember being shocked, and may have been mildly amused. However as the urine (this was not a carpeted theater) started flowing down to my seat near the front, I did move seats.
Overall, I liked the motion picture. But I was annoyed at the liberal politics embedded in it, and I was especially annoyed with how ROTC was treated. At the time of the motion picture release, the U.S. was still in the middle of Vietnam War hangover, and the producers decided to treat ROTC as the future baby killers of Vietnam, circa 1962. In one scene, they have one of the ROTC cadets about to kill one of the heroes of the motion picture. The motion picture was full of harmless, though gross, hijinks. And all of a sudden an ROTC cadet was about to kill someone. That was out of place in the motion picture and shows how much the writers/producers hated the military.
Of course, if you’re going to let liberal politics spoil your enjoyment of the arts, it means a lot of content would get spoiled. It’s true today, and it was true then.
But here’s my main point. This genre that Animal House started or helped start, had little or no politics in subsequent motion pictures. Not Porky’s, not Revenge of the Nerds, or even subsequent National Lampoon films of that time.
There was a bit of overreach with Animal House that Hollywood corrected for.
Lest we forget that the hit Bill Murray comedy STRIPES, from 1981, is decidedly pro-military and anti-communist — and unabashedly unPC.
Hard to imagine Hollywood doing anything like it today, and even harder to imagine young people (who are more politically correct, unpatriotic, and pro-socialist than any cohort in U.S. history) flocking to see it if it did.
Sigh…
It’s Czechoslovokia, it’s like going into Wisconsin!
The Groove Tube predates Ky Fried Movie. It had both Chevy Chase and Richard Belzer, too. I remember the line for that movie stretching around the block.
“A Fistful of Yen” in Kentucky Fried Movie was awesome.
It absolutely does predate KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE.
… ButANIMAL HOUSE was a game changer. When a little raucous comedy comes out of nowhere and takes a huge chunk of the discretionary income from every teen and twentysomething in America, it changes Hollywood. It has to. And it did. In ways that THE GROOVE TUBE and KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE did not.
So maybe this is the key: Did Groove Tube and Kentucky Fried Movie also have (female) nudity?
As I recall, yes. They also looked terrible from a visual perspective.
Good lord! By 1978 (the year ANIMAL HOUSE was released) female nudity was already a staple of R-rated comedy.
ANIMAL HOUSE was a game changer because it was staggeringly — and I mean staggeringly — profitable in relation to its cost (which was paltry), so Hollywood spent the next several years chasing the same audience (young people) with the same type of storytelling (raucous, anarchic, youth-centered) — with varying degrees of success.
But there are people on this thread (no names please!) who are acting as if the content of John Landis’s movie was somehow new. It wasn’t. Not by a long shot.
One example (among dozens): Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, from 1970. Hip, irreverent, youth-centered, anarchic, and, yes, rated R.
I hated movie MASH. All the simultaneous talking, to start.
I remember just loving Getting Straight, with Gould and Candice Bergen, and also rated R. It’s a memory I would like to erase.
Altman as seriously overrated would be an interesting discussion.
The Kentucky Fried Movie is the crowning achievement of American cinema.
Somebody never saw Catholic High School Girls In Trouble! (one of the sketches in KFM). There’s a very funny shower scene.
Loved MASH. Easily my favorite Altman flick, along with CALIFORNA SPLIT. (But I’m not a huge fan of his work)
And you were, there, and you were there . . .
Groove Tube: Both male and female nudity. In fact, one of the more memorable scenes shows a little cartoon-like character talking about the perils of VD. As the camera moves in to a close-up we see that the character is actually a talking penis. In another scene a nerdy hippie lustily chases a beautiful girl through the woods as she lightheartedly strips her clothes off. He follows her lead, stripping as he goes… well, I won’t spoil the punchline.
The most enduring skit, however, is probably Chevy Chase singing “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover.” No nudity required.
That comes with every Robert Altman movie.
It sounds like too many people who just happened to see Animal House first, somehow assume that it was the first nudity ever shown. Or something.
Exactly! It’s insane! There’s a flash of female nudity in THE GRADUATE, for crying out loud. And that movie came out in ‘67.
What is wrong with these people??
I was in college in 1984 when home VCRs were still something of a big deal, and the few video stores around would rent them out along movies. My roommates and I would pool our money once or twice a semester and have a movie weekend. The Groove Tube was one of those we rented.
I remember that scene, and my roommate Cullen’s reaction when he figured out what we were looking at. That was probably funnier than the scene.
IIRC, it wasn’t so much a cartoon character as it was a real-life “puppet”. And it was wearing little glasses.