"Thank You God!": The Animal House Thread

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

if anythings going to make sense in this crazy world any more you cant hold kevin bacon up as a yank

xp boom

I think we’re missing a demographic here in the Bacon stakes. The people I know who really loved Footloose had it on their VHS shelf next to Mystic Pizza and a few others of that era that belong to a different canon. They’re... not dudes on message boards

Ah, and Dirty Dancing! how’d I miss that one

flashdance

fame

maybe

and lookit i say maybe but rly its not maybe

maybe you have a very fixed notion about dudes on message boards

kevin bacon wasnt in tap but he couldve done a job holding the walking sticks in that one scene imo

yeah maybe I mean dudes posting on this thread, tbf

present company and actual lovers of these films excluded

Because I had about 30 seconds in Alan Zweig's record-collector documentary Vinyl, I actually have a Bacon number of 2 if you go through Don McKellar, 3 if you go through Harvey Pekar.

I think I'll take another look at Animal House within the next few days. Thinking about it a bit more, I don't think Bad News Bears fits that well with AH and all those other films.

The director of Bad News Bears also directed the Golden Child and Fletch, and has the story credit on Cool Runnings... he's the real Kevin Bacon here.

kevin is the reduced fat bacon

harsh to call him streaky tho

Thinking about it a bit more, I don't think Bad News Bears fits that well with AH and all those other films.

Agreed, and glad you pointed it out. The "curmudgeon has to take care of a bunch of unruly children" genre is not really part of the "snobs vs. slobs" cycle, though there are overlaps (Meatballs, most obviously).

yeah except the movie is about a team of slobs playing a team of snobs

True. I was more just thinking that Animal House invented/popularized the "slobs vs. snobs" genre while The Bad News Bears was drawing upon a tradition of older comedians having to deal with children (I'm sure there is some W.C. Fields precedent here, but I can't think of the specific example).

Comedy at the expense of snobs has been popular forever. Animal House was a particular variant on a very old theme.

I think in general, whether you think it gets there or not (I loved it the one time I belatedly watched it a few years ago), The Bad News Bears aims higher than the other films--specifically, how horribly adults can behave when it comes to kids' sports.

karen allen was v. cuet

The director of Bad News Bears also directed the Golden Child and Fletch, and has the story credit on Cool Runnings...

That's Michael Ritchie of The Candidate, Smile, and Downhill Racer. Please take a course on New Hollywood, f. hazel.

Pretty sure I saw The Golden Child twice in theaters, for some reason. More recently I found it unwatchable, for good reason.

yes he had a rough start but eventually was able to realize his vision: not one but two Fletch movies