Agreed. I never thought it was great or meant to be great either. It’s not really my thing, but others love it, and I assume there are things I love that other people find stupid.
I saw it for the first time about two weeks before I went through rush. It really put things in perspective for me and gave me a sense of humor about the process, which I don’t think a lot of people had or have.
I was in my first year of college when it came out. I thought it was the funniest movie I’d ever seen.
20+ years later I buy a copy. I watch it every couple months and still appreciate it.
And I quote it all the time, trust me, I’m in pre-law.
I thought you were pre med…
It’s much funnier on DVD when you don’t have tons of edits for TV.
I will only say that generally speaking, comedy doesn’t age well. Do I still find it funny? Yes. Would I expect someone under 25 or so to find it funny today? Maybe not.
Animal House is a classic. I don’t find as many things in it uproariously funny as I did when I was younger, but there a still parts that make me howl with laughter.
Definitely NOT overrated.
The 1978 film itself, of course, was somewhat nostalgic, for American campus life in the early '60s (when most of the original National Lampoon crew went to school), when the party-animal Deltas and the elitist-asshole Omegas were pretty much the whole lineup, and there was no SDS or counterculture or campus riots, nobody had even heard of Vietnam, nobody was much interested in politics, and just smoking marijuana at a prof’s house was daring and transgressive and mind-expanding.
An interesting literary portrait of the same melieu can be found in Hearts in Atlantis, by Stephen King (another Baby Boomer).
Can you name a better comedy in that particular sub-genre? It’s The Best. I can’t even begin to describe it’s awesomness!
Now if I go back to CF and see a similar thread about the Blues Brothers being overrated today, I’m going to be pissed.
My first thought, actually, was that so many college students are taking longer to graduate that this line is no longer intrinsically funny.
Hey tr0psn4j - you fucked up. You trusted us!
Hey actually I did. Should be CS, not CF. How do I misspell an acronym? :smack:
Guess I can’t spend my whole life worrying about it though.
kunilou’s right. Psychotic, but absolutely right. We gotta take these bastards. Now we could do it with conventional weapons that could take years and cost millions of lives. No, I think we have to go all out. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part.
We’re just the internet message board posters to do it.
I think that the simple fact that several posters are quoting or paraphrasing lines from a 32 year old movie indicates that it had some impact.
Spud, I am appointing you thread representative to the social committee
And here I thought I was being sent over to sit with Mohamud, Sandeep, Sidney, and Clayton.
Only if you are a wimp or a blimp.
At the time it came out, it was hilarious. I guess you just had to be there.
Comedy, however, is very much a product of its times.
Lenny Bruce doesn’t sound as groundbreaking and taboo as he was at the time he was orginally recorded; George Carlin isn’t nearly as funny as when his albums were released, and don’t even get me started on Cheech and Chong.
Don’t get me wrong; I still find them all to be funny, but I wouldn’t necessarily expect someone who was 20-something to see them the same way, just in the way I didn’t find what my father found funny to be as funny as he felt it was, such as Abbot and Costello, the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy.
Rest assured, Amimal House was outrageously funny when it was first released. It was, however, the first of it’s genre, and the first is usually eclipsed over time.
Not Sandeep, the guy’s name was Jugdish…I remember thinking, “What the heck kind of name is Jugdish?”
Mention modern art, civil rights, or folk music, and you’re in like Flynn.