And I was amazed that they could sell it over the counter.
National Lampoon suffered several bad financial breaks. First off, the original founders had an option which required the publishers to buy them out at a certain period if they chose to invoke it. The publishers thought it wouldn’t be invoked but it was. Due to outside reasons, it was a particularly bad time for the publishers to have to pay off the founders.
The magazine had been expanding into other fields when it was sucessful; many of these other ventures failed.
The publishers ended up selling the magazine; it was resold several more times (as I recall, at least one set of owners defaulted on the payments and the magazine went back to the previous owners). As someone mentioned, at one point, actor Tim Matheson was one of the owners.
By this point National Lampoon magazine obviously was not a profitable publication. The real reason people were interested in buying the title was to acquire the right to the name and the royalties from the back catalog. Both of these assets still have value; movies like Dorm Daze and Van Wilder pay National Lampoon for their endorsement even though the company had nothing to do with the production of these films. And old material from the magazine (or movies like Animal House) is still making money by being reissued.
For several years, one of the conditions of owning the rights to the National Lampoon brand was continued publication of the magazine. So once a year, the company would put out a single issue to fulfill this requirement. The issue would be filled with reprinted material from previous issues, have as few pages as possible, almost no ads, and only a few hundred copies would be printed. At some point, this requirement was voided and the magazine was allowed to die.
Stainz writes:
> I was stumped, maybe because I’m Canadian.
The interesting thing is that many of the first people working for both The National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live were Canadian.
Cite, please?
The screenplay for National Lampoon’s Animal House was written by two fraternity members and one of the founders of the National Lampoon magazine. Chris Miller (Dartmouth '63) is an Alpha Delta Phi. Harold Ramis (Washington University '66) is a Zeta Beta Tau, and was his chapter’s vice-president. Doug Kenney (Harvard '68) considered the Harvard Lampoon building, a miniature Flemish castle, his Animal House, as Harvard had no Greek-letter fraternities, per se.
Regarding “Animal House” and the greek system.
Some documentaries that came out during the promo of the 25th anniversary edition of “Animal House” (“Double secret probation”) all discussed this. Surviving writers explicitly mention the revival of the greek system as a major negative effect of the movie.
Plus, just watch the movie! Look at how the regular greeks are portrayed. Sheesh.
The movie makes the point that you can be a fun fraternity (like Delta House), or you can be a tight-ass fraternity (like the Omega House). It’s hardly a blanket indictment of fraternities.
This page has a small image of a parody ad they ran: “If Ted Kennedy drove a Volkswagen, he’d be President today.”
http://www.superbeetles.com/vintage_ads/vintageads6.htm
It’s about halfway down the page.