Is "Animal House" overrated?

[zbuzz]

@NDP

I think it might have been for Jaws II.

Well, so long as he didn’t steal one for Jaws: The Revenge, I guess that makes sense.

[E-DUB]

You’re right, Kimballkid. I did forget Sutherland, but he wasn’t one of the leads and was in pretty much everything those days.

[Tibby]

Meh, I found Animal House mildly amusing.

Belushi’s funniest and most underrated film, IMHO, is The Neighbors. He plays the meek, mild character in this one (which I like better than his wild and crazy characters). Sadly, this was his last film.
Funny
Funny
Funny

[jrepka]

It is overrated in much the same way that Star Wars (1977) is overrated in that both defined a new genre or resurrected a tired genre)

It is overrated in the same way that Casablanca (1941) was overrated in that both are quoted so much that when you watch them, all lines of dialog seem cliche.

It is overrated in the same way that the first few seasons of SNL are overrated – there were screwball comedies before (A Funny Thing Happened… and Laugh-In) but when you compare them with the bulk of the comedy that was being produced at the time (try watching an episode of the Flip Wilson Show, which was considered to be a pushing-the-envelope show).

What is interesting, as someone pointed out above, is that none of these were originally intended to be classic works of art (even Casablanca was produced as a run-of-the-mill-1940s-movie-by-committee), but they captured the Zeitgeist at the time.

The sad thing about genre-breaking art is, of course, that it inevitably creates a generation of crappy xerox copies of itself, and xerox copies of the xerox copies, and suddenly Vince Vaughn is a movie star

[Sir_T-Cups]

The first time I saw it was my freshman year of college in 2004 because it’s the “ultimate college movie and you have to see it!”.

I can’t remember my reaction but I doubt I laughed very much because I had heard all the jokes/seen all the parodys/seen all the clips beforehand and didn’t think it was very funny.

That being said I don’t think you can properly give this movie it’s “rating” because there’s too much popularity/cultural significance to judge neutrally.

I haven’t seen it in so long that I can’t be the one to take myself out of the knowledge of the movie and review the movie based on it’s merits: jokes, gags, plotting, characterization, etc. (plus I’m a generation removed).

Gun to my head: I would say it’s properly rated as a funny movie that defined a generation and inspired cultural change

[Acsenray]

@Sir_Prize

Did Animal House have an impact on college campuses?

In February, The Atlantic magazine did a long piece about how fraternities routinely avoid liability for deaths, serious injuries, and sexual assaults occurring at chapter houses and universities’ unwillingness or inability to take strong action against chapter houses. — Why Don’t Colleges Get Rid of Their Bad Fraternities? - The Atlantic

That article mentions the movie and suggests it has some relationship with the resurgence of Greek life following the student protest era:

Animal House, released in 1978, at once predicted and to no small extent occasioned the roaring return of fraternity life that began in the early ’80s and that gave birth to today’s vital Greek scene. The casting of John Belushi was essential to the movie’s influence: no one had greater credibility in the post-’60s youth culture. If something as fundamentally reactionary as fraternity membership was going to replace something as fundamentally radical as student unrest, it would need to align itself with someone whose bona fides among young, white, middle-class males were unassailable. In this newly forming culture, the drugs and personal liberation of the ’60s would be paired with the self-serving materialism of the ’80s, all of which made partying for its own sake—and not as a philosophical adjunct to solving some complicated problem in Southeast Asia—a righteous activity for the pampered young collegian. Fraternity life was reborn with a vengeance.