Did anyone know Metcalf played The Master in Buffy Vampire Slayer? Imdb lists him in 8 episodes. He played the character one time in Angel.
I think he also played the father in Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” video. And he played it just like Niedermeyer.
I saw Animal House when it first came out. I laughed like hell then, and I still do when I rewatch it. I like it, but I can see where it would not translate well to younger generations.
Specifically, during that period, a piece of federal legislation, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act (passed in 1984) essentially forced the states to move their drinking ages to 21, by tying the states’ federal highway funds to doing so.
He played the same character in the video for I Wanna Rock, too.
Some of Animal House didn’t work for me at all at the time, and still doesn’t:
-- Getting dates by getting sympathy from someone whose roommate had died
--- The "road house" scene that was probably on-target with the social dynamics of Otis Day snubbing the frat boys when they try to pal around out of their element, but descends into outright racism after that
On the other hand, a lot of the film worked, especially if you’d been in a similar situation and could relate. I’d just graduated from a college where I lived in a dorm (not a frat) where everyone had nicknames, like the ones depicted in the movie. Our dorm wasn’t as grubby as Delta House was, but it was grubby enough. We didn’t have toga parties, but the parties were themed and orchestrated. There were recognizable “types” at the house. So, yeah, it had an air of nostalgia. There had been hijinks, and the movie provided those, but exaggerated and writ large.
If you can, read the book that came out coincident with the film’s release. It’s been reprinted many times since, and it’s not a “novelization” or a cheap tie-in like many similar movie books that came out around that time. It actually seems to contain legit backstory and additional information and stuff from scenes cut from the movie. (and it’s got great art from Boris Vallehgo and Shari Flenniken and other Lampoon contributors)
So we learn the REAL reason for Pinto’s nickname, which would’ve made the frat pin scene a lot funnier if they’d left it in. And we got to see Einswine and his files of pre-written college papers, not to mention a scene with D-Day reciting Shakespeare at a lake, with a real skull. It’s not Chris Miller’s original stories from the Lampoon that the film was based on, but sort of essential additional material that fleshes out the film.
I’ve never really thought of the “road house” scene as racist. To me it just shows how far out of their element the Deltas are. Maybe I find it funny because I once found myself in a similar “We are gonna die” / “we’re the only white people in here” situation.
I love “Animal House”. So many great quotable lines. Including one that came to haunt me during my own college years… “Seven years of college down the drain!”
It’s been probably 15 years or more since I’ve watched more than just YouTube clips from Animal House, so while I’m pretty sure I’d still find the whole thing funny, I don’t know for sure. (Our copy is in VHS. We don’t have a VHS player hooked up to anything anymore.)
Who can’t love the scene between Otter and Marion Wormer in the grocery store? “I have a husband named Dean Wormer at Faber. Still want to show me your cucumber?” And “now we could do it with conventional weapons, but that could take years and cost millions of lives” is one of those lines I’ve found many opportunities to use over the decades.
Drinking ages varied from state to state in the mid-1960s, mostly 21, a decent minority 18, and the occasional state with 19 or 20 as their drinking age. During the Vietnam era, the argument “he’s old enough to be sent to Vietnam but not old enough to buy a beer” had enough persuasiveness that a lot of states (most, IIRC) lowered their drinking ages to 18. (IIRC, Connecticut lowered its drinking age to 18 right after I went off to college in Connecticut in the fall of 1972. And there was much rejoicing.) As kenobi65 said above, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act forced states to raise the age back to 21 in the mid-1980s.
With the counterculture era, frats were in a bit of decline in the early 1970s. I remember my dorm-mates and I bought a refrigerator in the fall of 1972 from a frat that was closing due to lack of members. But they were starting to have a resurgence by the middle of the decade, a few years before Animal House. Animal House certainly didn’t hurt that resurgence, though.
1). The teenage girl misrepresented her age.
2). The teenage girl in question wasn’t forced to drink, she arrived and started slamming drinks two-fisted.
3). Pinto doesn’t seduce her, her initiates with him very eagerly, and he’s hopelessly inexperienced.
4). He doesn’t have intercourse with her while she’s passed out, the angel on his shoulder talks him out of it. (Devil calls him homo.)
That’s perfectly valid, and everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but did ya see what ya did? Just like the O.P., you want to make a point, and you make it by selectively ignoring some aspects of the actual plot, and ignoring the historical context.
Someone reading this is frothing up, ready to knock me for “blaming the victim” and “slut-shaming”, but those concepts didn’t exist at the time the move was made. I don’t think that makes the movie harmless, or that people have to find it funny now, or re-create this movie. But I do dislike people working so hard to prove their modern point of view that they twist the movie around.
I enjoy anti-PC comedy as a breath of fresh air against what I feel is an over-sensitive culture we now live in. But when someone goes off I a rant against the old sexist comedies that I enjoy – well, I’m just gonna poke at them a little bit harder. Cause now I get to be comedic at their expense.
Yeah, that’s the missus’ and my favorite among the MANY classic lines. And we still chortle over the time she mortified one of my kids by sticking pencils up her nose while waiting for a school counsellor.
Much comedy does not hold up well. And tho they are not the flawless nonstop laugh riots I’d like to remember, But I’ll still stick w/ Animal House, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Caddyshack.
Just about anyone really. My sister was in a sorority, and said that Frats pretty much accepted anyone who would accept the hazing, do what they were told, play along, etc. As the Deltas are reviewing slides of applicants:
“Ah whatever. We need the dues”
I always thought it was “We need the dudes”, but know, Pinto seemed harmless enough, it was Flounder who proved Bluto to scream.
After four years in Delta, Flounder would be Bluto.
This certainly was different at the college I attended (which was about 40% Greek). I didn’t rush or go in for any of that bullshit, but there were definitely tiers of frats and what kind of people would/could end up in each one (same with sororities.) People who pledged certainly did not get bids from every house. But there was an “Animal House” type of frat that would accept anybody who wanted to be in it. It was the least exclusive and least prestigious frat, but it was the one I enjoyed the most. Unfortunately, they got kicked off campus the next year for, I dunno, pot? Somebody falling out the window? Something like that. My memory is hazy. (Looking it up, it was the latter. Looks like it recolonized four years later, after I had graduated, apparently as a dry house. )
So this guy is a total loser? Let me tell you the story of another loser.
Also, the girl couldn’t have been thirteen because she was a cashier at the Food King. At a minimum she would have had to be sixteen.
Agreed, and Arkcon lists some good rationalizations for it, and I’ll add another: it wasn’t meant to be funny, per se, but instead something a lot of guys that age could identify with.
She is the Mayor’s daughter. He may have pulled some strings and the managers at Food King preferred not to have their legs broken.
14 is the minimum age under Federal labor law (non-ag).
Who knows what it was in 1962.
Though i’d be surprised at a 13 year old cashier.
On reading this thread, and refreshing my memory I have to say that a movie with that many great lines can’t be “unfunny.”
The case kind of falls apart.
I’m old enough to be guilty of ignorance about how the world worked back in the 1960s. Fortunately, in retrospect, my being scared to even touch a woman was a good thing. But my ignorance of the bad things done to large classes of people doesn’t make them right in any way.
Because **they **weren’t ignorant. Women knew. Blacks knew. Gays knew. Jews knew. Only straight white christian men had immunity from their behaviors. And they were always a minority of the population, even if they had a near monopoly on power. They were their own Electoral College.
Animal House thought it was punching up. That was the essence of good, approved comedy back then. The enemy was elite white men in power. They were such a small percentage of the whole that the straight white christian Delta men could consider themselves part of the downtrodden - until they venture into a black world and learn some unpleasant truths. Today that’s called a teachable moment. But the Deltas never learn that they are part of a problem for others, like women. They merely have good intentions and until the broader public ignorance was assailed good intentions were deemed sufficient. At least by some.
Old popular culture is cringeworthy in a thousand ways. You do have to put yourself back in the heads of people of their time. That’s increasingly hard to do as time passes and all the people who lived through those times die off. (Try to read older humor, 100, 200, 500 year-old humor. It’s almost impossible.) You can be sympathetic to their good intentions. You can laugh at lines that are timeless. You are absolutely not required to laugh at sexist or racism or homophobic humor just because they thought it was funny. It was wrong then exactly as much as it’s wrong now. Ignorance is not a free pass.