Why have they been reduced to making shite like Van Wilder and Bag Boy?
The Vacation films were among the best comedies of the '80s and Animal House is one of the best comedies of all time. Sure, those movie were sometimes raunchy as hell, but they were also smart, sophisticated, and most importanly, genuinely funny.
It’s been all down hill since Christmas Vacation, though, and most of what they produce these days seems like stuff that wasn’t quite clever enough for Tom Green.
So what happened?
The magazine went into decline around 1980 and finally gave up the ghost in 1998. Note that the successful films were all based on stories that originally appeared in the magazine. So that area was cut off.
Ultimately, the Lampoon became an organization that didn’t develop comedy as much as it tried to make money selling the Lampoon name.
In addition, the talent in the original Lampoon was amazingly good. People like Doug Kenney, Henry Beard, Chris Miller, P.J. O’Rourke, Michael O’Donoghue, John Hughes, Tony Hendra and cartoonists like M.K. Brown, Bruce McCall, and Ed Subitztky were brilliant. No one came along at that level to replace them.
I think that (the so far unreleased) One, Two, Many (2008) is one of the best National Lampoon efforts in a long time.
YMMW, of course - I think that our tastes may be quite different. My metric for how good a “National Lampoon” movie is is how well it matches the spirit of the magazine (in the late seventies and early eighties, when it didn’t suck.)
The Vacation movies were abominable from the start. Hell, Chevy Chase had top billing - you can’t come back from that.
Anyway, One, Two Many reminded me a lot of what made National Lampoon great. Writer John Melendez’s script is strikingly like something Chris Miller might have written back in the day. (The protagonist, in particular, reminds me of “Bernie Boom Boom” from the classic short stories.) The script is not nearly as shallow as you might expect from its premise, and manages to surprise.
It’s everything a National Lampoon movie ought to be. I went in with very low expectations, and was surprised. It was, in fact, approximately the experience that I was hoping for in 1985, when I queued up for Robert Altman’s interpretation of O.C. and Stiggs. (The less said about that, the better.)
It’s still a step up from their movies in the 90’s.
Using the ultra-pseudoscientific process of cherrypicking random National Lampoon movies on IMDB and looking at their ratings, I’ve come up with the following:
Van Wilder (2002) - 6.1/10
Bag Boy (2007) - 4.5/10
Senior Trip (1995) - 4.5 / 10
Last Resort (1994) - 2.1 / 10
Even if we give Last Resort an extra bonus point for starring the two Coreys (thus allowing it to conjure up a bit of 80’s nostalgia), we can see that the 90’s movies still fall short, and that I should never, ever be allowed to do any kind of real scientific research whatsoever.
I watched that exact same question when I watched a few minutes of “Bag Boy” on Comedy Central (is this what inspired your question as well?). Seriously, it’s embarrassing that such horrible movies are given the greenlight.
Apparently, at one point the National Lampoon brand name was used by anyone willing to pay for it:
Well, that’s heartening. (Unless too much damage has already been done to the brand.)
It would be nice if more “true to the roots” pictures got made.
If I make a wish like that, we’ll end up with Letters From the Editors: The IMAX Experience.