"Thank You God!": The Animal House Thread

I think Peter Riegert is fairly well known for roles on Seinfeld and The Sopranos, Karen Allen for Raiders of the Lost Ark.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/417AW0B10NL._SY445_.jpg

An ex-girlfriend of mine was particularly fond of quoting the "Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life" line when describing her misspent adolescence.

i find it fairly apposite now and i'm 50 this year

i am aiming to cut it down to one in three at any one time, while being realistic about it yknow

Forgot about Local Hero--I guess that's Riegert's most well-known movie role (unless it's AH itself). His Seinfeld appearance isn't as well known as, say, Philip Baker Hall's or Teri Hatcher's, but he does get off one of my favourite Seinfeld lines ever: "Or we could not do the show altogether, how about that?"

John Landis is a primary culprit for destroying Hollywood comedy, along with Ivan Reitman, Nora Ephron, and Ap*t*w.

if only Bob Hope could've stayed young forever

And Woody Allen could've REDACTED

they were very funny once, so i'm glad you figured that out

John Warner is great playing Dean Womer. You also got Donald Sutherland in almost a walk on role (maybe another scene with him wasn't used).

that's John VERNON. He was better in Point Blank.

Woody Allen is at the top of my "was never funny/sign of someone with shitty taste" list.

"I'd count Kevin Bacon as famous, but more for an internet fluke than anything he ever actually did."

Footloose made $80 million.

It’s true tho that he is most famous for the meme that stemmed from his widespread fame

Kevin Bacon is famous ffs, the Internet has warped your minds

Animal House did not make him a star, tho... in fact i probably did not know he was the piece of pledge chicken on all fours til the '90s.

He's actually had three films besides Animal House with 100-million+ in box office:

"Thank You God!": The Animal House Thread

I'll have to disagree, though. Minus the Six Degrees thing, I think he'd be like Ed Harris, a well-known character actor--Harris has had six 100-million+ films, and he's also had numerous Academy Award nominations, which Bacon hasn't. Is Harris famous? Not as famous as Bacon, I don't think, and I'd attribute that to Six Degrees. I think Wikipedia is a decent generalized measure of these things: "Bacon has become an icon for the concept of interconnectedness (as in social networks), having been popularized by the game 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon'." It gets a pretty sizable section on his page, and also a separate page of its own.

Wrong link:

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/people/chart/?view=Actor&id=kevinbacon.htm

We should poll this vs Revenge of the Nerds as dubious frat comedies of their respective eras.

judging Footloose strictly by it's box office and not decades of being a vhs/expanded basic cable/dvd staple/80s pop culture touchstone is incredibly disingenuous

Ed Harris has no movie that's a pop culture artifact like Footloose

How would you explain Lori Singer's relative obscurity then? I'm not trying to be disingenuous, I just have a different opinion. I assure you that Footloose is not any kind of a touchstone for me.

counting up $100 million grossers when the guy was not the star (or when most ppl seeing the film were not aware of him) is pointless

Footloose is sufficiently 'iconic' of '80s pop crap that KB reprised it on one of the late-night junk shows in the last 2 years... it also inspired a flop Broadway musical and a film remake.

How about we split the difference here? The summary sentence from his biography.com page:

Kevin Bacon is known for hit movies like 'Footloose,' his marriage to Kyra Sedgwick and the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

Which is probably more or less how his NY Times obituary will begin.

That game, btw, whose premise would simply not work at all if nobody knew who tf kevin bacon was before the invention of the game

Like how the fuck would ppl play it?

xxxpost because Kevin Bacon was the star of the movie and the teen heartthrob and also has been more successful since!

you are being ridiculous

Footloose is like 16 Candles etc, how were you when it came out?

go on eBay now there's like Tiger Beat posters of Kevin Bacon you can buy, do you think there are of Ed Harris?

i stood over an underwear-clad Kevin Bacon in an 'immersive' off-Broadway play in the '80s

would not have had that opportunity if he was John Stamos-level

I think the premise of the game was that he'd done a whole bunch of films, not that he was especially famous: "In a January 1994 interview with Premiere magazine Kevin Bacon mentioned while discussing the film The River Wild that 'he had worked with everybody in Hollywood or someone who’s worked with them.' Following this, a lengthy newsgroup thread headed 'Kevin Bacon is the Center of the Universe' appeared." It's not the Six Degrees of Marlon Brando or the Six Degrees of Marilyn Monroe--I don't think fame entered into it. There's a baseball version, and to get the shortest chains, you don't type in Babe Ruth or Willie Mays--you use guys like Bobo Newsom. (Do you have to know who Kevin Bacon is to play it? You don't even have to type in his name, which is the default setting on the Oracle site.)

I was 23 when Footloose came out; it meant nothing to me then and nothing to me now. I haven't seen it. (Are you able to argue your side without the "you're being ridiculous" stuff?)

Also worth noting, I think: "They appeared on The Jon Stewart Show and The Howard Stern Show with Bacon to explain the game. Bacon admitted that he initially disliked the game because he believed it was ridiculing him, but he eventually came to enjoy it."

If the game was a celebration of Bacon's already-established fame, I doubt he would have been reacted that way.

i stood over an underwear-clad Kevin Bacon in an 'immersive' off-Broadway play in the '80s

I’m glad this thread has moved on from “is Animal House good” to the more interesting and controversial topic “is Kevin Bacon famous”

Kevin Bacon is famous because Footloose was/is gigantic

Stripes and Airplane are about 1000x better. The Jerk and Meatballs less so, let's say 100x better. In the context of the late 70s/early 80s, Animal House is way more popular than it deserves to be. Hell, the Bad News Bears is both more transgressive AND raunchy. And more funny!

just watched Stripes for the first time in ages, didn't hold up much better imo

I still like the first half of Stripes--it gets kind of draggy after that. I'd also say The Bad News Bears is the best of the bunch.

also the Footloose soundtrack needs to be considered in terms of cultural impact


Footloose: Original Soundtrack of the Paramount Motion Picture is the original soundtrack of the Paramount motion picture Footloose. The original nine-track album was released in 1984 and reached number one on the US Billboard 200 chart on April 21, 1984, where it stayed until June 30, 1984.

The original soundtrack contained six Billboard Hot 100 Top 40 hits, three of which reached the Top 10, including two number-one hits, "Footloose" by Kenny Loggins and "Let's Hear It for the Boy" by Deniece Williams, and "Almost Paradise", a duet by Ann Wilson and Mike Reno that reached number seven.

it's 9X platinum

He's being doing TV adverts in the UK for EE, the shitty mobile network I have the misfortune to be signed up to, for years now. I think he's now on the verge of going from "Oh look there's Kevin Bacon in an advert" to "Oh this film has that guy from the EE adverts in it".

Stripes becomes a bullshit military adventure at some point. John Candy utterly wasted.

I bumped a Bacon thread

(xposts) Okay--fair enough. I think because I'm a little older than some of you guys, the centrality of Footloose is a blind spot for me. I run into that a lot on ILX; I have a different set of a reference points. But I will hold to my view that the Six Degrees idea is an important contributor to Bacon's fame.

and Kevin Bacon is famous because of Tremors, obviously

I was 13 when Footloose came out. I knew it was big, but I didn't know it was that big. (I've never seen it. Top Gun, either.) Also, I've heard that song "Almost Paradise" about 700,000 times over the last 35 years and had no idea it was from the Footloose soundtrack.

Footloose is the first movie that I remember playing non-stop on cable. I imagine that plus its hits-spawning soundtrack are the reason for its continued ubiquity, which it would not necessarily have achieved had it come out in the 50s or 60s (when its basic plot was already being done to death).

bacon has baconed

but having hit movies over three or four decades cant be handwaved away by referencing whoever lori singer is

like, tremors ffs

his invisible man launched sony movies

he is the skinny liotta

he plays second man and steals shows

he is maybe the greatest living canadian

he's from Philadelphia

did u mean clemenza

canadianism is more than just geography cmon guys

Canadian Bacon

i remember that

i liked this movie for a few weeks during high school. feel like it was really sold as "this is an important comedy movie" something that professional comedians, Lampoon types or Simpsons writers all held in high esteem but was kind of from an older generation for me to really relate to.

Belushi was def funny but imo the Simpsons/Futurama parodies are as good or better than the movie. ROBOT HOUUUUSE!

So weird how networks thought they could develop a prime-time series based on an R-rated comedy (see also: "Black Bart," based on Blazing Saddles, starring Lou Gossett, Jr. and Steve Landesberg).

xp

They even thought they could turn Jim Bouton's Ball Four into a series. They're very optimistic that way.

So weird how networks thought they could develop a prime-time series based on an R-rated comedy

because... M*A*S*H?

oh, haha, right

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore worked out OK...

what was that Fox show that was basically a rip-off of Ferris Bueller?

it was a PG, tho (and pretty different in tone nonetheless) xp

Parker Lewis Can't Lose

there was also a Ferris sitcom (featuring Jennifer Aniston!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferris_Bueller_(TV_series)

So weird how networks thought they could develop a prime-time series based on an R-rated comedy

because... M*A*S*H?

Also "Fame" ?

Parker Lewis Can't Lose

I have really fond memories of this show but am sorta scared to re-watch. it was pretty po-mo iirc

Fame was a solid 5-year hit on TV, but MASH became a juggernaut.

I have really fond memories of this show but am sorta scared to re-watch

Me too. I remember it being much funnier, and much weirder, than the Ferris Bueller movie (and, obviously, the Ferris Bueller TV show).

xpost also Hogan's Heroes

the 70s was a fucked up time. once i caught an episode of The Love Boat on tv and pure exploitation just two women in nighties w bits blurred out for modern broadcast.

well that was a loose (dumb) variation on Stalag 17. You might as well call the original Battlestar Galactica a Star Wars series.

xp

The Love Boat was based on the last scene of Some Like It Hot, iirc.

Well, nobody's perfect.

That or "Ship of Fools".

have we lol'd about VICE of all places publishing this nonsense yet

Eh, the absurdity of their "We're moral voices now - stop laughing!" schtick is just taken for granted at this point.