National Lampoon's Vacation: Everything You Didn't Know

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret history and little known details behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows, and more. We are your Roy Wally's of way out pop culture stories. You're Marty Moose's of Minutia, your Queen Wagon Family Trucksters of trivia. You're Flashy Ferrari driving females of facts. My name is Jordan run Togg.

00:00:32
Speaker 2: You put so much more effort into these than I do. At this point, I feel like I'm just coming home and staring at you dead eyed across a long dining room table, and not talking about my day at work, and then not contributing to the household chores, and just going to bed without saying a single word to you or make an eye contact. Like a John Cheever short story. The two of us are.

00:00:55
Speaker 1: I'm Alex Heigel, and what a perfect amble to today's episode. We are talking about the movie that taught me how to be a dad. I'm Not a Dad theoretically, a movie that managed to become a beloved classic despite the presence of a dead dog and a dead grandma. A movie that is so hilariously misanthropic that we can't help but recognize at least a tiny part of ourselves. We are talking about National Lampoons Vacation. For me, this is one of those comedies where I can recite probably conservatively two thirds of it by heart, and I never remember actually sitting down and watching this for the first time. It was just something that I absorbed through endless TV viewings and maybe the occasional movie rental, which was always a fun surprise because it had the nastier jokes and more swearing that didn't make the cut for broadcasts, so that was always fun. We all know the story. An overworked, slightly neglectful dad uses his two weeks of summer vacation time to make up for a year's worth of absentee parenting by treating his kids to a road trip to Wally World. Litany of disasters ensue, costing the man his sanity, His optimism veers into psychotic intensity, and finally madness as he hijacks a theme park to show his kids a good time. It's an undeniably mean movie, but it redeems itself not only by being hilarious but also making us feel a little bit better about our own families. And obviously it's deliciously eighties with it's John Hughes Penn's script, Lindsey Buckingham Penn theme tune, Chevy Chase as a leading man, and Christy Brinkley is the dream girl. But there's something timeless about how seriously Clark w Griswold takes himself and this trip. It is, as he says in the movie A Quest for Fun, It's Ahab and his white whale, It's Don Quixote and his windmills. And yet there's something tragic but endlessly hilarious about watching this man trying way too hard, only to repeatedly get knocked back again and again. But he does it because he wants so badly to connect. We've all had that moment where we're trying so hard to deliver with all this self created pressure, and it's just not happening. I think there's more of Clark and all of us that we care to admit. Heigel, what do you think about this movie? Oh? I love it.

00:03:13
Speaker 2: I mean this is one of the old time I had some older cousins, Aunta and Beth. This was one of their favorites and I mean, we just watched it a lot, and I, as a kid, I never caught on to how mean it was because it just seemed like it kind of seemed like the way that families were supposed to be.

00:03:30
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:03:31
Speaker 2: Yes, And then also, you know, my my family and I once went from Pennsylvania where I grew up to Disney World on a long road trip with detours through Savannah, Georgia and some other places. And so I have a very I've never heard I have a very uh yeah, my sister's cherished memory of it that she always talks about is one night when my folks had already gone to sleep, we like watched Rocky horror or not sorry, Rocky four when my y quite the Freudian slip. Yeah, we watched Rocky four on like a hotel TV one night and I had just read Midnight in the Garden of Good and even so I was insufferable as a as a child. But I mean for so many reasons, but also because of that, and yeah, so the whole.

00:04:21
Speaker 1: Road trip think.

00:04:22
Speaker 2: And also dude Harold ramis Man, I mean, yeah, that dude has a crazy high batting average. Caddy shat vacation, Groundhog Day, I mean like one of those pros. Well, yeah, but I mean I would put like groundhog Day is like a perfect film, you know. And then and then even into I realized that, like you know, later he did analyze this and Bedazzle and those are those pretty competent like studio comedies, and like, as time goes on and we get into this more horrifying sludge gray sludge content of all the streamers and all this be you know, and that just happened comedy, like low rent bad comedy writing, you realize how even something like Analyze this, You're like, oh my god, this was like head and shoulders above this stuff that is being produced now like twenty years later. Yeah, Ramus is great, and it weaponizes Chevy Chase's like every man and also like venomous scorn in a synergy that I don't think has ever been replicated. Like I don't I'm hard pressed to think of any other role because even in Caddyshack, he's just kind of doing the grouchow Marx thing where he just like strolls through the film just riffing, and the whole film like bends around him. But this movie really synthesizes the essence of him being like, yeah, that looks like a dad that I would see somewhere. But he's also a terrible person and even to his own family, he is a psychopath and a raging dickhead, like and nothing. I don't know what their role hits that mark for me, So I mean it's yay, though the Hindus speak of karma. I implore you, I implored chevy Chase.

00:06:12
Speaker 1: Gotn't break, which is weird because look gets you later. It was kind of a change of pace for him because it's hard to remember now, but in the late seventies early eighties, he was this slightly glamorous, very cool figure and then this was like a real change pace, embracing his his inner dork. He hit the middle aged like you know, as like Bill Murray was right, there's a graph somewhere where as Bill Murray was peaking in likability and attractiveness, chevy Chase was falling. Yeah, and they were doing so on a fixed ratio to each other. You can't see it right now in the playback when I'm gesturing to Jordan straight what I'm talking about where you know, people just the myth of Bill Murray, like increased exponentially, and the more people were exposed to Chevy Chase, the more like man, that guy sucks. Well, I have a very important question for you before we continue. Is your I was gonna say it's your dad, but it could be either parent. Did they have a Clark Griswold esque energy to them?

00:07:10
Speaker 2: Maybe in terms of like drive, you know, my dad is very much like I think it's very telling that at one point my dad probably could have become a long haul trucker. He's a purposeful driver, and he's a disciplined one, a literal driving then yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And he's just like a road trip fiend, you know. So he's not quite as openly psychotic as Chevy is in this movie. Maybe I am the poison seeps through. I think I might be, honestly in terms of just like, ye.

00:07:48
Speaker 1: Know, we're getting we're getting there. Well, I wanted to talk to the audience right now. I mean, Higo and I have actually taken a road trip together when our band did a tour and we drove from the greatest tour, the greatest tour, World's greatest tour, uh from h I think we called it Three Friends in a minivan tour except the four of us, so that made it awkward. How far do we go wing from New York to Richmond, Virginia. That's correct, And I remember you having the psychotic intensity of Clark Riswold, though.

00:08:22
Speaker 2: Well you forget that. I wrote all the songs and sang and played guitar on all of the things. So I was trying to conserve my energy, you know, like a like a proper diva should. But had I my brothers, you know, we were supposed to drive from Jersey to Harrisburg after.

00:08:39
Speaker 1: Playing a show that one night. I paid, We're going to a hotel.

00:08:47
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, So yeah, I have that driving capacity and I can drive. I love highway driving, dude. People have talked about like I can't drive on the highway. I get like highway hypnosis or whatever. I find it so meditative. I would drive six hours without blinking, and then in the city I will go to pieces in twenty minutes trying to find a parking space.

00:09:08
Speaker 1: Oh. I don't know how you guys let me get away with not driving. I think I just flat out said I am a kit Yeah you did, I did. I appreciate that, and I feel really bad about that. Now.

00:09:18
Speaker 2: I don't know what about you. You got any road trips from where? Where the hell you from? Waltham, Worcester.

00:09:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, outside of Worcester. Actually, every year on Christmas Day to this day, my father and I drive down to my aunt's house outside of DC.

00:09:34
Speaker 2: And that's like, she's a ten hour drive. Okay, that's a nuts, dude. I've never done that, and for a family thing, like, holy god, eight hours a clip. Yeah, but do you wake up at like four duh?

00:09:46
Speaker 1: Sometimes? Well, we'll get to this in the area. My dad is one of those dads who gets irate if he doesn't leave the house at his arbitrarily chosen departure time. Better go to better early at day ahead of us tomorrow, Yeah, exactly. So yeah, yeah, we don't. Actually, now that I think back on it, my nearest family member was six hours away, So we done a lot of drives growing up. Yeah.

00:10:12
Speaker 2: All right, man, Well, sixteen minutes in, let's start this light this candle. I know this was gonna be such a fertile topic for us.

00:10:21
Speaker 1: Well, that's what's so great about this movie, though, I Mean, it's got so many connections.

00:10:25
Speaker 2: To everybody's life in one way or another. It's a uniquely American experienced. The road trip to somewhere that sucks. Yeah, because in Europe they just get take a train to somewhere that trucks, but it sucks in a.

00:10:39
Speaker 1: Very exotic way. Here you can drive ten hours and be in the exact same like.

00:10:44
Speaker 2: Flat stra Americ strip mall garbage. Yeah yeah, a series of low lying sheds.

00:10:52
Speaker 1: Is America Well from its roots is a short story by a comedy legend to the prerequisite stories of Chevy Chase being difficult, the way the Griswolds family car killed, the station wagon, and the long lost original ending, plus the psychotic cross country shoot that nearly killed one of the film stars. Here is everything you didn't know about National Lampoon's Vacation. Wow Wow. Like so many great eighties movies, National Lampoon's Vacation starts with John Hughes, the patron saint of cinematic suburbia in Reagan's America, Come on, you got the breakfast Club pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Weird Science. Need I say more? But Vacation predates all this. It actually has its roots in a piece that John wrote for the National Lampoon magazine in the late seventies called Vacation fifty eight.

00:11:44
Speaker 2: Should we backtrack and explain the National Lampoon like we will the next paragraph, you idiot.

00:11:53
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, all right. At this stage, John Hughes was working at an unfulfilling day job. He's the creative director of a Chicago ad agency called the Leo Burnett Company, but managing the Virginia Slim's account was not exactly ideal for this want to be creative. His ad job required weekly trips from Chicago to New York City for what he described as quote multi martini lunches because remember this was just a few years after the mad Men era, and whenever he was there, he would find an excuse to sneak away from whatever meeting he was in and drop by the National Lampoon offices to try to rustle up a writing assignment from editor in chief Tony Hendra, who would later become most famous to me for playing the manager of Spinal Tap and, as Hughes would later recall, after many hours, over many weeks of sitting on a worn cloth couch in the reception area trying to coax a reaction from aloof staffers and freelancers. I was kindly invited by editor in chief Tony Hendra into an office where he explained how one becomes an editor. It amounted to writing filler. I was delighted my work was accepted, and I quickly became a contributing editor. I continue to beg off client lunches to race up town for editorial meetings. Higel, do you want to give us a little background on The National Lampoon magazine?

00:13:08
Speaker 2: Though it's best known these days as the titular preamble for any number of film franchises, the National Lampoon initially began as a print publication in nineteen seventy, an offshoot itself of Harvard University's revered comedy paper, The Harvard Lampoon.

00:13:26
Speaker 1: For those of you who are seeking.

00:13:27
Speaker 2: More context or background for this, there's a great book and a Netflix documentary, unrelated but with the same title, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, which covers the founding of the magazine by Doug Kenny and Henry Beard, the rise of some of its famous writers like PJ. O'Rourke and future SNL headwriter Michael o'donahue, and his expansion into radio in stage shows, which is where basically the founding class of the comedy of stars of the nineteen eighties got to start. Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, John Belushi, Go Radner, and Chevy Chase. And then the National Lampoon proper made its jump into movies in nineteen seventy eight with Animal House, made on an incredibly thin shoe string budget and an obvious insane huge smash, But when John Hughes started writing for them, it was still mostly known as a you know, like I guess you would say, like a regional lit mag.

00:14:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, somewhere between like Mad Magazine and McSweeney's. I guess, like, I can't really, I mean, it was very popular. I mean they the famous National Lampoon cover that everybody remembers who lived for that era is the dog with a gun being held to its head with the headline as by this magazine and or kill the Dog. Incredible by the way, Yeah, I know, it's I know, I feel bad finding that as hilarious as I do.

00:14:48
Speaker 2: It's kind of one of those you had to be there things. It's just a great bit of marketing.

00:14:52
Speaker 1: Man.

00:14:53
Speaker 2: What do you even think the fact that they got that on newsstands. God love them like no, It's a different time.

00:14:58
Speaker 1: So John Hughes started writing the sho short story that would eventually become Vacation in the winter of nineteen seventy nine when he was housebound with his wife and young baby during an especially horrendous blizzard, and in this pre work from home zoom Era, he took advantage of this unexpected stretch of free time to flesh out Vacation fifty eight, which is a short story about a Detroit family who takes a disastrous trip to Disneyland in California. Now, I'm not really sure how he landed on this topic of vacations. I know that National Lampoon was at that time planning a vacation themed issue, so I'm guessing that was what gave him his starting point. But John Hughes would describe his story as quote a piece set in the days when toddlers stood on the front seats of cars and parent cigarette ashes blew into the faces of the children standing in the back or hanging out open rear windows of the station wagons. I had no story, but enough anecdotes to get the assignment, and he literally went to his car and got a ran McNally wrote Atlas from the trunk and plodded out a root for this family to take and dreamt up all these horrific things that would happen along the way at each stop. And There are several major differences between the short story and the film version, the biggest being that the short story is told from the point of view of the young boy, Rusty, looking back on his youth twenty years earlier in nineteen fifty eight. As we'll get to the film takes place contemporaneously and focuses on the father. The fact that the short story is told from the kid's perspective allowed John Hughes to get away with elements that are arguably even darker than the movie. For example, take the story's opening line, if Dad hadn't shot Walt Disney in the leg, it would have been our best vacation ever. Incredible. In this story, the dad goes to jail for the attempted murder of Uncle Walt, which is just it's amazing. They would obviously change this to Wally World in the movie for a bunch of reasons, all of which have to do with not pissing off the Disney Monolith. John Hughes would say, I wrote the first sentence and the rest was automatic. I use the voice of a boy to cover my lack of skins and to flatten the big moments in Rusty's prosaic language, A ruined vacation and an assault with a deadly weapon upon an entertainment legend enjoyed comparable importance. And if you haven't read this, I highly recommend reading the piece it's out there online because it is hilarious and there are some great observances of over zealous dads in trip prep mode which really resonated with me. We have to get up at four in the morning. I want to make Chicago by lunch, Dad said, showing us upstairs. The telephone rang at nine forty five the next morning. It was Grandpa Pete calling to see why we hadn't gone yet. We'd all overslept, even the baby. Dad was furious. I could see him screaming and pounding his fists on the bathroom sink. Or five hours behind schedule, he yelled, and we haven't even left the damn house.

00:17:45
Speaker 2: It's so the rhythms of it in the writing did. I don't know if he ever spoke about this, but it's so similar to Gene Shepherd from like Christmas Story.

00:17:54
Speaker 1: Oh wow, that's what it.

00:17:56
Speaker 2: And they're both those kind of I mean Chicago, about those Midwestern boys with you like you're right.

00:18:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I love that. I highly recommend checking that out. I mean I again, I just I see so much of my dad in Clark, and sadly I have become the exact same way. And you know, I understand it as I've gotten older. It's about wanting to maximize fun and having the best time possible. But it just makes us come across as control freaks. I will both be mocking my own father and defending all the ways have become just like him throughout this episode, as is the root of the American man in media. Yes, to quote John Hughes writing in The Breakfast Club, we all become our parents. It's unavoidable. It just happens anyway. Speaking of John Hughes, truly peerless writing, he had this to say about what drew him to the themes of vacation in an essay for Zoetrope all Story, which I've never heard of. I understood that the dark side of my middle class middle American suburban life wasn't drugs, paganism, or perversion. It was disappointment. There are no gnawing insects beneath the grass, only dirt. I also knew that trapped inside every defeat is a small victory, and inside that small victory is the great defeat Capital Jesus. That's grim. It's grim, but it's so good. Did he write that after Blue Velvet?

00:19:17
Speaker 2: Is that a knock at the opening shot of Blue Velvet where the Lynch pushes down through the grass and you see all the worms and bugs and stuff not in at the ear.

00:19:26
Speaker 1: That you know what I mean. It's a very specific reference he made, so perhaps well spotted, well spotted.

00:19:32
Speaker 2: I would love it if John Hughes and David Lynch hung out to be a fly on that wall.

00:19:37
Speaker 1: I could almost see it.

00:19:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, just like talking about the fifties.

00:19:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, some diner.

00:19:46
Speaker 2: And darkness, suburban darkness.

00:19:50
Speaker 1: I mean it does. Yeah. They both went very different directions with it. Well. John hughes Vacation fifty eighth story was inexplicably bumped from National Lampoon's Vacation the themed issue and wound up getting published in an annual edition composed of pieces that didn't make their intended issues, sort of a grab bag issue. Despite this slightly ignoble debut, it earned attention nonetheless from all sorts of places. As Hughes would later write in this All Story Essay, unbeknownst to me, Warner Brothers purchased a story upon publication in September nineteen seventy nine. I believe I was in Chicago, and my only experience to any reaction to Vacation fifty eight occurred on a flight home from New York when I heard two businessmen laughing out loud and discovered they were reading my story. As a salaried editor, I had no ownership. The lampoon publisher Mattie Simmons generously invited me to write the screenplay, despite my having never seen a screenplay, and with that, basically they were off. And this is interesting to me. John Hughes would always intimate that Vacation was his first screenplay, but that's not strictly true. He wrote an early national Lampoon flop, nineteen eighty two's Class Reunion, which was a movie that bombed so hard that held just owned it.

00:21:01
Speaker 2: Were things just way easier back then. Yeah, oh yes, okay, cool, Yeah, just checking. But do you wanna do you want to expand on that?

00:21:09
Speaker 1: Though? No? I just I don't. I don't give a shit about screenwriting.

00:21:14
Speaker 2: I mean, but it just bums me out that someone like you know, you whops every drop of sweat on their brow turns to blood. You know, you have some unproduced screenplays and these guys are just like you want to do this a lifetime, not even a full lifetime ago just tripped into the entire careers.

00:21:34
Speaker 1: We're like, ah, he is John Hughes.

00:21:37
Speaker 2: Though, that's true, and John Hughes is an edge case. Yeah, he's a very vis He's John Hughes, But I mean.

00:21:44
Speaker 1: Did he not write Home Alone in ten Days?

00:21:46
Speaker 2: The likes of not John Hughes were afforded similar at least entry points into the industry.

00:21:53
Speaker 1: Fair Well Vacation made the jump from the page to the big screen thanks to the magazine's entrepreneurial publisher slash resident adult in the room, Mattie Simmons, who inexplicably went from running diners Club, which was the first credit card company, to being the moneyman for National Lampoon, a magazine that gave Rolling Stone Hunter s Thompson Era a run for its money in terms of debauchery and chaos, so that's interesting. Unfortunately, talking about the development of this film, Vacation involves mentioning enemy of the pod Jeffrey Katzenberg. Mattie Simmons later recalled when I brought the pitch to Hollywood, the first guy I brought it to was jeff Katzenberg, who was at Paramount. He said it would never make a movie. It was too episodic, too consequential, too consequential. That's a weird quote. I said, Yeah, it's a road trip. It's supposed to be episodic. You go from town to town, place to place. Ultimately, Jeffrey Katzenberg deemed Vacation fifty eight unfilmable. It's a quote. So Matty Simmons moved over to Warner Brothers, where an executive named Mark Canton was gunning for it. So Warner Brothers bought it, and for the director's chair, they brought on Harold Ramis, a National Lampoon vet who'd recently made his directorial debut with Caddy Shack. And despite his National Lampoon connection, it's kind of surprising that they decided to bring Harold Rames on because he'd had a rough time making caddy Shack, But, as Warner Brothers executive Mark Canton later said in a Making of documentary, Ramis had finally learned which end of the lens to look through, so they decided to give him the green light. OU I know it's pretty good though. That's that's a cigar chair. That's a literal cigar chopping executive quote. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:23:42
Speaker 2: Oh well, considering who would play the Griswold family patriarch, Clark Chevy Chase, It's not Chevy, right, I thought I thought it was Chevy with a Chevy.

00:23:53
Speaker 1: It's like the Z. It's Chevy with a Chuck.

00:23:57
Speaker 2: Well, when considering who would play the Grizzwold family patriarch, Clark Chevy Chase was front of mind since Ramus had just directed his fellow National Lampoon Vet in Caddyshack, though Chase's career hadn't quite taken off as he'd expected after his uh premature and precipitated for personal reasons, i e. Being jag Uh departure after the first season of SNL in seventy six, Caddyshack had been a hit and he was relatively hot. I remember this quote from him talking about his career where he was like I'm best when I'm playing guys who were either ahead of or right behind the ball.

00:24:36
Speaker 1: Ahead of the ball.

00:24:37
Speaker 2: He talked about like Caddyshack being like ahead of the ball, like that guy's like on and just super cool, and then like Fletch and Vacation and all this other stuff as being like a guy who's perpetually like on the wrong foot.

00:24:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, his role in Caddyshack always kind of confused me, cause like I don't remember there were I mean maybe because I'm just so used to seeing him do pratfalls. It was like he's the humor in that. That was just his sort of sage you drugs, Danny Good, Yeah, like very smooth, Yeah, which made him not as funny to me.

00:25:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's no flop sweat, right, Yeah, there's no flop sweat. And that's to me like one of the Chevy hallmarks. Well, the producers of Vacation decided to maximize Chevy's then star power by shifting the perspective of the movie from the perspective of the sun. In the story rusty, like in Hughes version to Chevy's character. It's important to remember at this point in the early eighties that the National Lampoon film franchise was not exactly a powerhouse. Despite their strong start with Animal House in nineteen seventy eight, they'd released a string of flops, like a bunch of movies you haven't heard of, including National Lampoon's Class Reunion and movie Madness of Class Reunion. Roger Ebert observed, it has its funny moments, but they're rare enough that we're acutely aware of them. In a golf swing, Chu che got him Roger Ebert murder scene.

00:26:05
Speaker 1: God, he was good.

00:26:06
Speaker 2: The rule of the hapless suburban Dad was a big chef for Chevy, which is now again hard to recall.

00:26:11
Speaker 1: Very cool.

00:26:12
Speaker 2: Uh you know, his movies had been kind of a checkered but he was still a big star from SNL and uh, as his perennially quoted line from Weekend Up Date went, he was Chevy Chase and we were not. Uh, you know, he was tall. That goes a long way. He still had all his hair back then, he still had a jaw line. Uh that that would get you a lot in seventies, America still does who's the Chevy Chase analog today, someone who's widely derided for their comedic chops but still in uh in demand. Colin jo just, oh yeah, nailed it one shot. I mean the weekend call that we call that had a no scope headshot in the gaming community. Jordan nailed it. Chase was tall, handsome, Stillhetele's hair and positioned is something between Johnny Carson and Uh, he said, carry grant. I've heard of quote that people are stupid. Nope, that's dumb. I would say Jack Lemon. He's like I could easily have seen Chevy Chase step into something like the apartment.

00:27:25
Speaker 1: Oh but a fast.

00:27:26
Speaker 2: Talking, kind of average looking guy who's funny but too nervous.

00:27:31
Speaker 1: All right, Tony Curtis maybe like Tony. He's good looking, he's tall. Okay, Well, you know, I don't make the rules. Uh.

00:27:42
Speaker 2: Vacation was a chance for Chase to embrace his inner dork, which would define the rest of his career. So, upon taking the role, as anyone could probably see within a mile of knowing who Chevy is at this point in his career, UH, he decided to help rewrite the script with Hair Ramis so that it would focus on himself, a move that supposedly pissed off John Hughes to no end, and why wouldn't it. John Hughes' entire career is predicated on the internal complexities of the American teenager.

00:28:16
Speaker 1: I wrote, he's very interested in teenagers, and then I wrote, phrasing, you could assault that, but you didn't because you're better than that.

00:28:29
Speaker 2: Well that that remains to be seen. How many more episodes left on my contract? I'll stop, I'll stoop lower?

00:28:37
Speaker 1: Don't you think I won't. Ques remains one.

00:28:42
Speaker 2: Of the most astute observers of adolescent American life, so naturally moving the focus of the script of Vacation from that to a middle aged man was not his bellowick shall we say? Howard Ramis would later say, I saw John quoted in an interview saying he was going to start directing his own movies because he was tired of seeing his scripts ruined by other directors, which is a hell of a thing to read when you are directing at John Hughes script. In addition to that pov shift, Hughes would go on to write and direct sixteen candles in nineteen eighty four, a year after Vacation was released, which is a pretty good middle finger.

00:29:23
Speaker 1: As far as those things go.

00:29:26
Speaker 2: You changed my script, I will make sixteen candles get bent. In addition to that shift of point of view, Ramus and Chevy also updated the time to the contemporary era, which actually made a certain amount of sense from a plot perspective. There was a desperate dad trying to relive the road trips of his youth in the fifties in the middle of Reagan's America, a very different era altogether. Calib orton a guy on Twitter who has complimented my current Twitter handle. I love Caleb really.

00:29:56
Speaker 1: Oh yeah.

00:29:57
Speaker 2: Caleb Porton's great, great writer. He wrote for MTV the News. He's this piece that was from Vanity Fair. He writes a lot about great California country music. He's a Merle Haggard fan. Yeah, great photographer as well. Hire Caleb, he writes of Vacation. They updated the setting to nineteen eighty three, when suburban America tried to start from scratch and returned to Eisenhower ideals. Despite the social upheaval and progressive shift of the sixties and seventies, Norman Rockwell's sentimental idea of piling into a car for ramshackle family adventure had a more desperate appeal then, so Clark foisteds his own nostalgic idea of fun on nineteen fifties invention when Disneyland was new and the road trip was a conveniently packaged coming of age ritual on his apathetic family. The change that the kids don't necessarily give it about this whole trip is a big change from Hughes's original story, where everyone is uniformly pumped about going to Disneyland.

00:30:57
Speaker 1: Let's all take a deep dive into the recessness of the The.

00:31:01
Speaker 2: Character depths of one Clark Wilhelm Griswold. His middle name is revealed on his passport during the closing credits of National Lampoons European Vacation. Harold Remis describes the character thusly, Basically, we figured this was the story of a dad who gets two weeks off a year and overcompensates like a madman to give his family what he didn't give them for the rest.

00:31:23
Speaker 1: Of the year.

00:31:24
Speaker 2: For two weeks, he's going to be the world's greatest dad with an energy verging on the desperate, desperate to make up for his lack of involvement in his family, desperate to reconnect, so desperate he loses his mind, and yet the movie doesn't.

00:31:41
Speaker 1: Valorize that desperation. No at all.

00:31:46
Speaker 2: Chevy plays him like a slazy bachelor who's at once trying to reconnect the passion he lost with his wife and also making eyes at the hot blonde in a Ferrari. His actions are directly contradictory to his intent of reconnecting with his family, as kayleb Bright's and that aforementioned vanity fair piece. The problem in Vacation isn't the simple act of infidelity, but Clerk's immediate, non gradual willingness to commit it, and how the script then treats the consequence of his actions. Basically, he's a high functioning psychopath. He's driven exclusively by pride and self interest. The man has no moral compass. Oh man, here's a crazy thought experiment. What if Rusty grew up to be Patrick Bateman?

00:32:28
Speaker 1: Uh? I like that? Really?

00:32:32
Speaker 2: We got to do our sequel show, our sequel pitch?

00:32:35
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah?

00:32:35
Speaker 2: So actually no, because they're contemporaneous. So Patrick Bateman is is Clark Wiswold's slightly oldered bastard child from his wayward youth. When is American Psycho set early eighties, no mid eighties, It's like the whole dor Sea Wall Street eighties Master of the Universe Bonfire of the Vanities era. But some would argue that this dynamic of pride and self interest versus the quote unquote familiar obligation is what makes the misfortunes of the trip all the more delicious. They happen to the most deserving victim, the hubristic father, and it gives viewers a certain sense of recognition. As Harold Ramis said, Clark isn't a good husband or even a good person, but he's enough like people really are that we see ourselves in it. And now we transition from the flawed conceptual character of Clark W. Griswold to the flawed irl character of Chevy W.

00:33:38
Speaker 1: Chase. Whi's Chevy Chase's middle name. That's a great question. I think it's his real name is like Cornelius.

00:33:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, it is Cornelius Crane rules Cornelius Crane Chase. Is he related he's like? Is he related to Stephen Crane?

00:33:56
Speaker 1: Oh? No, I don't know about that, but I know his family like own part of New York. They're super wasting.

00:34:02
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, okay, Well there are not one, but three separate articles offering a chronology of Chevy's dictitude, moral lackings, titles like a Brief History of Chevy Chase being addicted to people, Gowker, cracked, split Sider, Vulture. He is famously one of the most disliked people in the entertainment industry. Mean spirited, arrogant, short tempered, probably kind of racists as well. I think Donald Glover said he said some racist on the set of Community to him.

00:34:45
Speaker 1: That being said, he was not that bad. On the set of Vacation.

00:34:48
Speaker 2: He apparently only had one tantrum, which grading on the Chase curve is pretty good. The end of production, when they were filming the scenes of a family packing to leave for the trip. The shoot took place in Los Angeles, which at the moment was in the midst of a horrendous heat wave, and Harold Ramis made Chevy do take after take of loading up the car with suitcases, and the heat was making Chevy cranky. Remis offers an amazing SoundBite he would flip out at everything, including lizards and animals. Speciesist Harold Ramis lizards count as animals. Harold rip Um. Fed up at having to do one too many takes, Chevy chucked a suitcase at Harold Remis, who was able to catch it in mid air, having preciently sensed that Chevy was about to lose it. Chevy later defended himself in a making of documentary by insisting it was an empty suitcase. Other directors in the Vacation franchise did not get off so lucky. Future Clueless director Amy Heckerling hated Chevy so much when she was directing European Vacation that she later claimed she quote couldn't go on the set unless I knew I had in my hand a physical ticket to New York, so that I could just go at any time. I had to hold it in my hand so I knew I had a way out. And a fun fact for all of you vacation stands out there, Amy Heckerling and Harold Ramis had an affair just before or after Amy got married to the guy who wrote Police Academy. They had a daughter together, and this woman didn't know that Harold Ramis was her dad for like twenty years.

00:36:26
Speaker 1: She will forever be known as the Vacation Baby. Her parents are two people who directed to different installments of the Vacation franchise. How cool is that? It's not bad? I mean, your dad's Harold Ramis and your mom's Amy Heckerling.

00:36:39
Speaker 2: That rules and for knowing would you trade that for knowing who your dad was for twenty years? Well, the person I thought was my experiment for all of our listeners.

00:36:51
Speaker 1: First I thought it was my dad, wrote Police Academy. So I mean that's that's the hell. Yeah, that's trading up. Yeah right.

00:36:58
Speaker 2: I would immediately disown that guy if I found out my time was actually Harold Ramis.

00:37:03
Speaker 1: I'm sorry to that man.

00:37:04
Speaker 2: Director Chris Columbus had an even rougher time when he was enlisted to direct John Hughes's script for Christmas Vacation in nineteen eighty nine. Columbus and Chevy Chase had a disastrous dinner where, according to Columbus, Chevy treated me like dirt. I stuck it out and even went as far as to shoot the second unit. Then I had another meeting with Chevy and it was worse. Columbus asked to be let go of the project, and then John Hughes felt so bad about the whole thing that he offered Columbus the chance to direct another holiday themed comedy he'd written, Home Alone, which speak of trade. Note I was gonna say, if you're talking what's the term I wanted? Lost return ROI? If you're talking to ROI. Having to deal with Chevy Chase for a while and then getting to direct Home Alone is pretty good. You can do a lot worse, pretty deep, pret cheap, pretty deep, pretty good.

00:38:01
Speaker 1: And you want to know more about that adventure. We get a whole episode on Home Alone, two hours, all the cocon you can eat.

00:38:10
Speaker 2: But that's enough about you, gross and weird. That's enough about Clark.

00:38:15
Speaker 1: Let's talk about his lovely wife, Ellen, played by Beverly DiAngelo, who initially didn't want the role. She'd been in Coal Miner's Daughter and the movie adaptation of the Broadway show Hair, and she was trying to jumpstart her career as a quote end quote serious actress. She'd later say in and Making Up documentary that vacation had all the things that would impede this serious movie career. Dogs, kids and a role as a mother, Her words, but her agent talked her new auditioning, and the rest is history. Others up for consideration for the role of Ellen Griswold were Kim Katrol, who I would assume would have been really.

00:38:54
Speaker 2: She was too hot, too hot, too young, and too hot, my beloved Kim control solely based on Big Trouble, Little China. I don't care what you're saying. She's so hot in Big Trouble, Little China. She was way too hot to play this this character at this time.

00:39:09
Speaker 1: Well, and also Marie McCormick, better known as Marsha Brady, was also considered. That's insane to me. She must have been she throws of her coke addiction. The other one. No, that was no, that was that one. Okay, So wait a minute. So she was like fourteen in nineteen sixty nine, so this is she would have been like twenty. She would have been like her mid twenties. That can't. That can't once again once again too. Although Beverly DiAngelo was only fifteen years older than her daughter Audrey in the movie, and seventeen years older than Anthony Michael Hall, who played Rusty, so so who knows that's actually a relative.

00:39:45
Speaker 2: That could be like a semi scandalous like like shotgun marriage timeline, that's within the realm of possibility.

00:39:52
Speaker 1: If like, no Marie McCormick, if she's in like if she's like twenty seven and she's gone, I'm in Beverly Dean. Oh yeah, oh yeah no that yeah, no, you're right. But speaking of kids, the character of Rusty was especially hard to cast. Harold Ramis went through dozens and dozens of auditions to fill the part, but he found all the boys to Hollywood two, in his words, bright and too energetic, or my translation to annoying. Eh. Then they went to New York City and auditioned some fifty more boys until they came across Anthony Michael Hall, who they deemed perfect all the way down to his braces, which they insisted he keep for the movie. Anthony Michael Hall and Dana Baron, who played Audrey, the two on screen siblings. They began bickering like brother and sister right away, and if I know anything about tween psychology. This bickering was perhaps intensified by Anthony Michael Hall's crush on Dana Baron. He also had a crush on his on screen mom Beverly D'Angelo, as we'll find out, thus highlighting two very popular porn subgenres. I had to let you get that line out, but who Savage, my friend, Thank you. Anthony Michael Hall became a frequent collaborator of John Hughes, with whom he'd make Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Weird Science. He actually declined to make the sequel to Vacation, European Vacation in nineteen eighty five because he was doing Weird Science with Hughes, which was bad news for his on screen sister, Dana Baron. Director Amy Heckerling, who was directing European Vacation, decided it would be weird if they had only one original sibling, so she decided to recast the role of Audrey as well when Anthony Michael Hall couldn't play Rusty Boomer. Although he's really really good in Weird Science and European Vacation is I think my least favorite entry in the Vacation canon. So all in all, he did the cinema world of favor, although I have to say I don't think he looks back on his teenage movie career fondly now that he's in what was he in The Mentalist? He was in some like big TV show in the twenty tens, and he's like very sturdy and musky. Now like he's I find him almost unrecognizable.

00:42:03
Speaker 2: Well, he's in uh bringing it back to my boy j C. It's John Carpenter, not Jesus Christ.

00:42:13
Speaker 1: Uh.

00:42:14
Speaker 2: He's in Halloween Kills, one of the worst of the late era Halloween sequels, and they're.

00:42:23
Speaker 1: All pretty well. He's not like the other overly smug three named boy from the eighties Neil Patrick Harris. Oh that's true where he looks back. Yeah, he seems to live in that persona whereas Anthony Michael Hall very much does not. I don't even know what are we doing? Where are you? But the true star of Vacation isn't a person.

00:42:52
Speaker 2: The best is when I spin out these these segments for you and you have no choice but to hail Mary Pass, just to start back and just punting it right into the end zone and see if someone will catch it.

00:43:06
Speaker 1: Who is the true star of the film, Jordan, Well, you know it's actually not a person but a car.

00:43:13
Speaker 2: New York City itself. Another character in America is a character in this movie.

00:43:19
Speaker 1: Actually, it's a movie about going to look for America and not finding it anywhere.

00:43:24
Speaker 2: It's a movie about family. Actually it is. That joke doesn't work. Yours was better.

00:43:31
Speaker 1: We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. But the true star of this movie isn't a person but a car. We're talking about the hideous station wagon with a very stately title the Queen Wagon Family Truckster. The Queen Wagon Family Truckster. As the car salesman played by SCTV maan say Eugene Levy says, if you think I hate it, now, wait till you drive it.

00:44:09
Speaker 2: He's so I always forget that he's in this dude, I love this car man, one of my one am my, Oh yeah, I sure do.

00:44:16
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:44:16
Speaker 2: I my first car before it was deemed to be have a rusted out, undrivable frame, was supposed to be a friend of the family gifted us a car that was shockingly like this one. I don't remember the actual model, but it had that faux wood grain paneling. It was a station wagon. I was so excited to drive it, and then we got it to the then inspection and they were like, oh, this thing is not street legal, like it will actually fall apart if you continue to drive it. Yeah, I know. I was God, I was going to smoke so much weed in that car.

00:44:52
Speaker 1: Didn't have like the back like the trunk back door that opens like a door, and had the two.

00:44:56
Speaker 2: Sure did I always did. It was like sixteen feet long. It was practically a hearse. I wish I could remember what the actual model was. Oh yeah, I love the Yeah, great car, great, great movie car in the ranks of movie cars.

00:45:11
Speaker 1: Well, it could have been a nineteen seventy nine Ford Ltd. Country Squire station wagon, because that's what they use as the basis for the Queen Wagon family truckster. But it was upgraded for extra tackiness. You had more faux wood paneling, had a boxier design, You had the double front grills and double headlights, and of course the metallic pee paint job, not to mention the green wall tires and the garbage bag airpag. It is truly something special, dude. It very well might have been a Country Squire. I'm sure it probably was. That's like the classic station wagon from that that's like the wood paneled yeah man. Upon seeing the finished product, Harold Ramis apparently voiced serious concerns that the car was just too ugly to put in a movie. A lot of reports say that this car was made for the production by the legendary Hollywood automaker George Barris, who is also responsible for the Batmobile, Jed Clampett's car and the Beverly Hillbillies, and various cars for the Munsters. But I've seen reports from online nerds, including one guy who built his own Queen Wagon Family truckster, which is insane. They say that this is not the case, so in a very literal sense, your mileage may vary. Ha. There were reportedly five There were reportedly five separate Queen Wagon Family Trucksters used during the production of this movie, each swapped out to reflect the various states of damage the car suffers throughout the trip. Much have said damage occurs when Clark inadvertently drives it off a road into Monument Valley, a scene which features one of my favorite exchanges in the entire movie. Wow, Dad, you just jumped this thing like fifty yards. Well that's nothing to be proud of, Russ And then under his breath clearly very proud fifty yards so there, and that was pretty much the attitude taken by the car's stunt driver, Dick Zyker, nicknamed Crazy Dick Zycher for reasons that will soon become apparent. He made a bet with the other crew members that he could jump the trucks for more than fifty feet in the desert scene, and everyone went and drew lines in the dirt making their best guess where this car would lands, like a long jump basically, and Dick Zyker, he's apparently gunning for a world record. He passed all of these marks. As Crazy Dick would say, when we did this film, it was the early days of this stuff. All I had was a helmet, elbow pads, and a Saint Christopher's medal. And bear in mind they were filming this in the middle of the desert, so if anything went wrong, they were so screwed. And I guess they were so far removed from locals that a nearby Navajo tribe started milling around the catering truck and accrding to Ziker, a medicine man from the tribe blessed the car himself and blessed the stunt as a whole before he set off, and perhaps that is why Dick Pzsicher was able to launch the truckster an astonishing distance. Reportedly one hundred and seventy three feet is the number I keep seeing sighted.

00:48:16
Speaker 2: That's insane, dude, that's evil, I know for inecond Yeah, I know what's a better what's a better car stunt?

00:48:24
Speaker 1: This or the French Connection chase scene? Oh? Good question, good question. I well, okay, wait, third option, although I guess that's not strictly a car. Back to the Bullet free with the train. Oh, bullet.

00:48:38
Speaker 2: That was a miniature, Dude, that was like a it was a large miniature, but it was a it was yeah, no, I need someone in that car possibly dying.

00:48:48
Speaker 1: Okay, French Connection chase, I'll tell you what has like a deceptively amazing car chase, which I would not have expected. The original Freaky Friday has an insane car chase at the and with the one with Jeddie Foster and John Aston. Yeah yeah, it's like really intense. Okay, well look it up on YouTube. It's nuts. I wonder if it was Bill Hickman.

00:49:12
Speaker 2: Oh, that's the guy who did the one in French French Connection.

00:49:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, The thing all about the French connection was, didn't they actually like sideswipe a car?

00:49:21
Speaker 2: That did not tell anyone. We're just like, get Fredkins in the back with a camera, let's do this.

00:49:28
Speaker 1: They went back and like paid for it though, right, Oh maybe I thought I did. Did you see about French connection on Twitter? This today? They went Disney has changed it on streaming? What how changed it?

00:49:40
Speaker 2: How cut out a slur? He says, never trust an N word coming into the station. Oh God, Hickman was bullet and French connection.

00:49:49
Speaker 1: That's crazy, Holy Bill Lakemane.

00:49:54
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty three, Hickman and fellow stuntman Alex Sharp witnessed a bank robber, Carl Flett, speed buy them on Ventura near the Laurel Canyon off ramp. After Hickman saw the suspect shoot police officer Alfonso Bag in the chest, he used his stunt driving skills to chase the suspect down on Laurel Canyon Road until long one could catch up. The car chase eventually ended up in a North Hollywood parking lot, where the suspect was shot and killed. That's god, what man, Hollywood, old Hollywood dude, that's Wild. His stunt driver was like, I'm gonna just engage this guy who I just saw shoot a cop.

00:50:35
Speaker 1: I'm gonna engage you in a high speed chase on Laurel Canyon, which are like little, Oh he's dead.

00:50:45
Speaker 2: Great bill it to SAG, like, send my send my percentage, my bounty hunting percentage to SAG. Amazing, what an incredible different era man All Black.

00:51:00
Speaker 1: Nineteen sixty eight Dodge Charger in bullet.

00:51:05
Speaker 2: People have been asking me, we bought this new car, what about a used car?

00:51:09
Speaker 1: We got a fucking.

00:51:11
Speaker 2: On to Clarity, a hybrid Puget, and I've been bitching to be boy. I got a reasonable adult twenty twenty three car. But if I was one of those rich, fucking idiots, my god, I would get a late sixties charger.

00:51:29
Speaker 1: The hell are you talking about? Oh? The jump for this movie The Truckster's Legacy. Yes, the Truckster's Legacy lives on in two very unexpected ways. One, in the beginning of the movie, there's a shot of Clark Riswold and this family setting off on their adventure, and it's an aerial shot where you see the station wagon on the freeway in Chicago taking an exit ramp. The producers of the Fox TV show Married with Children reused this footage and the intro of their show a few years later. WHI Yeah, I think is weird. But the greatest influence of the Family Truckster is that it killed the station Wagon. At least that's what automotive writer Pete Bigelow says in a twenty thirteen article for AOL's since defunct Autoblog. He pausits that vacation helped put the nail in the station Wagon's coffin, though he was quick to point out other factors, like the fact that the very year the film was released, in nineteen eighty three, Christler rolled out what's widely recognized as the first mini van, which became the spiritual successor to the station Wagon. He writes, in all its heinous glory, the p soup green Wagon Queen Family Truckster was a caricature of everything America hated about its station wagons, its wood paneling, its broad, expansive frame, and its boxy headlights. Its status as the frumpy domestic Haller and Griswold embodied the aloof American dad. Put the two caricatures together, and national Lampoon's vacation made the station Wagon in the eyes of consumers, a toxic product in one three minute scene. Ever since, the station Wagon has endured a sad, slow decline and no one shed a tear. But apparently Alex Heigel. Those are all the things you love about the station Wagon.

00:53:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, poignant American masculinity, ostentatious consumption, wood paneling, everything I love about the seventies. What was the Chrysler minivan? I don't know, wind Star. No, that's forward because we had a Ford wind Star, Dodge Caravan and the Plymouth Voyager.

00:53:28
Speaker 1: Wow. Oh I remember that many. Yeah, everyone's seen that many.

00:53:32
Speaker 2: I mean it looks like Actually the nineteen eighty four Renault Espase is considered the first true minivan.

00:53:42
Speaker 1: Oh. That's truly hideous. It's like an even uglier Privia. Oh wow, if you were a loved one, I don't have anything. God, I just loved minivans, man, I got high on so many minivans. That of thing, did you, like, know.

00:53:57
Speaker 2: Like a slightly like a like a guy you're of you who had a minivan? Y'all just cruise around in it.

00:54:03
Speaker 1: Chris even oh Is Fleming, Oh, I love that a lot of us had minivans. Actually, I had a grampy car. I had my grandfather's old zambille we had. I had a station wagon. I didn't have a minivan.

00:54:15
Speaker 2: But in the film, the Griswolds drove from suburban Chicago, Evanston. Is it ever listed where they're actually from?

00:54:23
Speaker 1: Is it?

00:54:23
Speaker 2: John Hughes, remember, I know it's I know it's suburban Chicago. It's got to be everything. John Hughes has to be Evanston. Uh to the fictional Wally World in southern California. John Hughes' original script sent the family through the southeast, but Harold Ramis correctly decided this wasn't especially scenic, so he re routed them through the southwest. Most filmmakers would have done the shoot on back lots and well chosen local locations, but Ramis and company went on a grueling trip similar to the one undertaken by the central family in the film to get the necessary footage. In July of nineteen eighty two, they embarked on an epic thousand mile journey with one hundred people crammed into a three hundred foot caravan of vehicles, not unlike a circus, moving six times in seven weeks and shooting at fifteen locations across four states. Nowadays they would see gi all of that. Aside from the Illinois and California locations.

00:55:19
Speaker 1: They shot at the.

00:55:20
Speaker 2: Grand Candid in Arizona, where the Grizzolds pause briefly to sightsee, and Saint Louis, Missouri, where the family truckster passes the famous Gateway arch, as well as Colorado and Monument Valley, Utah, which has to be one of the most filmed locations in US history. Some of these locations were extremely remote, as evidenced by the Navajo tribesmen who would wander up to the craft service table and their temperatures that would sometimes reach upwards of one hundred and twenty degrees. But to the producer's credit, they tried to make it as fun as possible for the cast, especially the children. For example, they held a little carnival in the hotel parking for the kids on the fourth of July. The journey had the opposite effect that it did on the Griswolds and made it into a real life family vacation, ultimately bringing the cast and crew closer together. As actress Beverly. DiAngelo later said, we were isolated in the middle of nowhere. It sparked the great friendship I have with Chevy to this day. He calls me his second wife. Harold Ramis had his work cut out for him shooting on these locations. He later espoused the theory that shooting is the only time you're making the film worse, which all aspiring filmmakers should do well to keep in mind. He'd explain that when you're writing, you're constantly fine tuning the bones of the film, making it the best screenplay in structure that you can, and when you're editing, you're taking all of the footage that you've shot and sculpting it into a coherent and entertaining film. But actually shooting the film often reveals that the script is not as funny as you thought it was, and nothing will go as planned. For example, there is a scene in the film where the Griswolds are rescued in the desert by someone right a camel, but the camel obtained by production refused to walk on the hot scene and the scene was scrapped.

00:57:07
Speaker 1: No way to plan for that.

00:57:09
Speaker 2: Ramis would later say, every shooting day is a big challenge, but we were feeling like we were accomplishing something good every day. In addition to keeping the caravan of one hundred plus cast and crew linked in the pre cell phone email era, Raymis had to figure out how to shoot actors driving moving cars rather than just green screening it.

00:57:28
Speaker 1: It almost like a parade float. They had Chevy driving the car and then they built this like walkway along all the edges of it, like three to sixty degrees of the car, so they could film like in the window as he's so he's actually driving the thing. I don't think very fast, and then he has like kind of walkways on all sides of the car with people filming inside the windows to get them driving with all the backgrounds and air conditioners. Oh yes, huge air conditioners were installed in the car to keep things cool for the actors because again this was like, you know, you're shooting in Monument Valley July, it's gonna be, like we said, upwards of one hundred and ten one hundred and twenty decrees.

00:58:06
Speaker 2: And those temperatures were especially challenging on actress Imogen Coca, who played Aunt Edna. For those of you who don't know your in nineteen fifties comedy history, which I assume is most of you get up on it, Virgins. Coca was a comedy legend, starring alongside Sid Caesar in the pioneering fifties sketch comedy Your Show of Shows, Jordan.

00:58:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, We've talked about this show a lot on here because it's writing room was a real murderer's row of mid century comedy talent. You've got mel Brooks, Woody Allen, a couple play right, Neil Simon, Carl Reiner. They all wrote for this show.

00:58:47
Speaker 2: And much like Beverly DiAngelo, Coca had to be talked into auditioning for the role. First of all, she was worried she couldn't.

00:58:54
Speaker 1: Be mean enough.

00:58:55
Speaker 2: Chevy Chase has described her as one of the sweetest ladies in the world, which is rach coming from him. And also she was worried about all the driving, since she was terrified of car travel. About a decade before the Vacation production began, she and her husband suffered a bad car accident, resulting in a list of injuries for her that included a fractured ankle, broken cheekbone, and a cutleg and a piece of the car's review mirror went through her eye.

00:59:24
Speaker 1: Jesus.

00:59:25
Speaker 2: Her agent assumed and or insisted that the movie would be shot on the studio backlot, so she tried out for the role, and this agent was, of course wrong. So Coca had to ride hundreds of miles with the rest of the cast in the backseat of the family truckster, with her tiny, withered hand on the ceiling to brace herself as they drove. When they drove over the mountains and the high elevations and the shoot, she would hide on the floor of the car, putting it mildly.

00:59:55
Speaker 1: She was stressed. I me got all the things to be afraid of in this production. Driving in a movie about a road trip. That's not a good match.

01:00:06
Speaker 2: This may have contributed to her suffering a stroke when production began shooting in Colorado. Harold Ramis said they filled a scene that morning and by afternoon she couldn't remember anything they did. Same sounds like me taping this podcast. After getting out of the hospital, she and her husband stayed up all night to relearn the dialogue, and they redid the scene the next day. Shamp I know, talking about professionals to that era, they would just just crank you through it, like, well, well, we're filming. The checks already deposited, I'm filming this scene. Stroke or not, this is marginally better than the faith that befells the character of Aunt Edna, who dies on the journey and is subsequently strapped to the roof of the car by Clark and then left on the front porch of a relative's home. It is one of the film's darkest moments, but it was very nearly much worse. It was originally scripted that after on Edna was tied to the roof of the car, there was a shot of her fingers moving, implying that she was still alive, and the ratings board had other ideas. It considered it cruel and so cruel cruel these the woke leftists.

01:01:28
Speaker 1: At the ratings I want you to know that.

01:01:32
Speaker 2: The real America would strap on an elderly dead aunt to the roof alive or not. Uh, They cut it and she was left alive.

01:01:43
Speaker 1: And speaking of cruel depictions of death, we have to talk about too, Chipper, we have to talk about Aunt Edna's dog, Dinky. As you may recall, Dinky doesn't make it through the trip either. Clark inadvertently leaves him tied to the car bumper, accidentally dragging him to his death. He only learns of this after being pulled over by a traffic cop who spots a leash tied to the car's bumper and assumes the worst Chevy chase recalled in the original script, they had a red stripe on the highway trailing behind the station wagon, and reportedly raym Is considered attaching an animal pelt in his words, to the leash, but he quickly realized that both of those things were way over the line. On a similar note, it really is amazing that there's a movie with a dead grandma and a dead dog that everyone hails as a classic. That's like the two taboos.

01:02:42
Speaker 2: A dead child that would have properly pushed it over the line, but it's amazing that this one has been canonized.

01:02:48
Speaker 1: The seam of the dog is really pretty tasteless, but it did result in some good karma. According to Harold Ramis, while the production was shooting in Colorado, one of the crew members saw a station wagon pulling al of a holiday in parking lot with a dog tied to the bumper. It was definitely a confirmed sighting. He said, thankfully someone on the production flagged the car down and saved the dog. Plus, I would say this scene raised awareness about this phenomenon. I don't think anyone was likely to forget that their pet was tied to the back of the car bumper after seeing this movie. Hopefully they wouldn't have before they've seen this movie, but certainly not after. So I just think that this movie saved a lot of pets over the years, which is good. And also the dog who played Dinky was later adopted by Chevy himself after the production wrapped, which I think is sweet. The highway patrolman who pulls Clark over and gets weepy with him was played by actor James Keach, who later produced Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash biopic, and the Oscar nominated documentary Glenn Campbell I'll be Me and he and Chevy improv the whole scene, which is immediately apparent because the pair are visibly cracking up and trying to hold back tears of laughter, which they kind of unsuccessfully try to pass off as tears of sadness in the scene. Poor little fella probably kept up with you over the first few miles.

01:04:18
Speaker 2: That's rough, Like, I don't know how, but it's hysterical. Oh no, that's what I'm saying, Like, I don't know how they got that fight.

01:04:29
Speaker 1: Scene knowing that they are that wouldn't pass muster these days. There's a lot of little, great improvised moments in this movie. I mean, say what you will about Chevy Chase as a human being, his gift for physical comedy is really unmatched. One of my favorite bits is a little moment that a lot of people miss. It takes place early in the movie when Clark is helping Ellen do the dishes at their house and she passes him dirty dishes that he never actually washes. He just wipes them with a rag and then puts them in the captains, which just says so much about his character. You're never done dishes like that. That implies that I've cooked for myself. Clark and Ellen sing during the trip, which wasn't part of the original screenplay. Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo just sang on the set to pass the time, and they decided that it would be cute to add that into some of their car scenes. And his physical business in this movie is so good. He can't resist, like fumbling with the car antenna or taking other minor pratfalls, and even though he pauses to look at the Grand Canyon for two seconds before moving on, is hilarious. And one time he got a little too enthusiastic while trying to find the gas cap for the family truckster at the gas station, he accidentally threw the license plate like a boomerang and the plate flew behind him and nearly hit the actress parked at the adjacent pump, resulting in a genuine look of concern on Chevy Chase's face if you watch that scene, like he actually is frighten for a moment. And the rest of the cast were also encouraged to improvise, which created a very collaborative, playful atmosphere on the set and this led to some great bits of business like cousin Vicki played by Jan Krakowski using her arm to stir the kool aid and Aunt Edna taking a bite of the p soaked sandwich that was also something that imaging Coka came up with on the spot, and Russ putting his feet up on Clark's headrest, and it was also a great bit from Randy Quaid as cousin Eddie that takes place when the Griswolds get to his house. He offers Clark the end of his beer and reaches for a new one for himself, which is great. Arguably, the scenes where Clark appears the most buffoonish are the ones he shares with the iconic blonde in the Ferrari, played by proto supermodel Christy Brinkley, making her film debut. While she only appeared in a handful of scenes, she traveled with the cast and crew for much of the shoot, which I'm sure was fun for them and fun for her too. She spent much of her downtime on location, whitewater rafting, and horse writing. She said that her scenes kept getting delayed, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the crew just wanted an excuse that she would just hang around longer. But I don't know. It's my pet theory. Was she with Billy Joel at this time? That's a great question. You think I would know that, and I don't. I would think you would. It's probably around this time. My Billy Joel fetish is uh. She's a third porn sub genre that they didn't get into in this movie.

01:07:26
Speaker 2: Yeah they were, well they they met in Saint Bart's in early eighty three.

01:07:33
Speaker 1: Okay, so this shot in July eighty two, so no bummer. I know somehow that it would have been. It's funnier knowing that Billy Joel was like maybe keeping up with the shoot, like tailing the shoot in its afraid that Chevy Chase was gonna.

01:07:50
Speaker 2: Say, it's funnier if you've been reading in the trades. He was like, he's like opening variety, like being like Christy Brinkley shooting a national lampoon comedy.

01:07:59
Speaker 1: With Chevy Chase. I'm better than Chevy Chase, right better? All right? Where she vacationing next to your Saint Bart's. All right, calls his travel agent. But Christy Brinkley a very talented woman. She drove the Ferrari herself, which is pretty impressive considering it's basically a street legal racing car, and someone had to give her driving lessons because Ferraris have an extra gear and to downshift or break you have to do what's called heel toe shifting, which is a whole thing that race drivers do. No one cares, but it's hard in early versions of the scripts, the character was supposed to wink or make eyes at Rusty the Kid. Now, though I've seen different explanations as to whether it was Christy Brinkley like a woman driving the car like a grown woman, or a younger passenger closer to Rusty's age. Either way, I sort of like this better. But once Chevy Chase signed on on the point of view of the story switched to him, obviously he got the girl because he's Chevy Chase and we're all not. The sadly nameless woman in the Ferrari appears multiple times throughout the movie, both on the road and also at the picnic stop, where Chevy performs his improvised slash obscene sandwich dance for her. It's pretty it's tough to watch. It's so cringey. I mean, I know that's the point. But also, when the Griswolds first enter the saloon in Dodge City, you can see Christy Brinkley featured in a copper tone sunscreen advertisement on the front desk, And I can't tell if this is just a happy coincidence or an intentional in universe easter egg. Like she's clearly some famous model that exists in their world. Her big moment with Clark comes at the motel in Phoenix, as she approaches him at dinner and he immediately denies having a wife and kids and claims to own both the motel that they're currently in and an airline. Then she leads him to the pool and convinces him to skinny dip with her, and fans of comedy know this where this is going. He is, of course caught by his wife, Ellen, his ChIL and the rest of the guests at the motel. In classic mid century motel fashion, the pools located at the center of the courtyard, thus providing a good view of Clark's humiliation for everyone. This was sadly not a fun scene to shoot for Christy. From the very start, everyone was trying to get her to actually strip naked. She recalled Harold Ramis mounting a strenuous intellectual argument, Christy, the nudity is very important, really, it's an integral part of the character, to which she replied, yeah, right. And as she said in the making of documentary, she had a quote pretty good thing going based on people imagining what was under her swimsuit and didn't want to ruin that, so she opted for a flesh colored body stocking instead. However, Harold Ramis remembers the day when the costume department called him and said, we have Christy down here. We need you to approve her underwear. Would you mind coming down and watching her try on lingerie a day, he always remembered. But the shoot itself wasn't very fun for her because she was so nervous. This is her feature film debut. After the first take in the pool, she went outside and burst into tears. Ramos told her that it was perfect, but she insisted she could do it better. So Harold Ramis walked back onto the set and announced, all right, everyone, Christy says she can do it better. Let's do it again, at which point she heard the entire cast and crew grown not helpful. I think it was the second take that winds up in the final cut. There was also supposed to be a scene immediately after this pool scene where Rusty gets seduced by a prostitute, but it was cut from the movie. Christy Brinkley would later revisit her role in nineteen ninety seven's Vegas Vacation movie, which, let's face it, needed all the help it could get. But she was also very nearly in nineteen eighty nine's Christmas Vacation, but unfortunately, her dad talked her out of it, fearing that she'd get typecast in quote that kind of angenu role. According to Christy Brinkley, her dad told her you have so much more depth. I don't think you should do it, and she didn't, and that remains one of her very few career regrets. She later told us Weekly, of course I should have done it, because it's so much fun to hang around with comedians. I mean, I love nothing more than to make people laugh. I'm sure that Chevy and I would have seen each other at the Christmas tree stand or putting the Christmas tree in the roof of by Ferrari or something. It would have been great. But she was also not asked to be in European Vacation. I don't know if I've ever even seen European Vacation all the way through.

01:12:28
Speaker 2: I know that, Oh it's funny, it's got an amazing bit. Yeah, it's got an amazing bit. Where they're at that really sums up the French to me. Where they they're at a they're at like a French thing and the French waiter is talking to him in French.

01:12:42
Speaker 1: And he's like, I'll tell you what I'll do.

01:12:47
Speaker 2: He's speaking French and the subtitles or showing what he's actually saying to them, and he's like, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll go to the chef and I'll have him get some dog food and put it on a really nice plate for you, and then instead of champagne, I'll get some black are from the dishwashing sink and I'll bring it to you.

01:13:02
Speaker 1: You won't know the difference.

01:13:04
Speaker 2: And they're just like oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, oh wow. And the whole thing about them getting trapped in one of the British like one of the London roundabouts.

01:13:13
Speaker 1: Hey kids, Big Ben Parliament, big bet again. Yeah.

01:13:18
Speaker 2: So yeah, Europeans good. I've even seen Vegas where he's uh, I like Vegas. His alias is mister Papa Georgio.

01:13:26
Speaker 1: Nick Papa Georgio. Yeah yeah, from you Arizona. That is a good one. Yeah, I mean yeah. The bit about Rusty in Vegas vacation, getting a fake ida and gambling and then just repeatedly winning and winning four cars, is that that's great. That's a really good bit. I do love that well. Speaking of Christy Brinkley and the Ferrari, this is a good time as any to talk about the music in Vacation, including the Ferrari women's musical theme whenever Clark catches sight of her in his rearview mirror. Now, I Mandela affected this theme in the head as the Lindsey Buckingham Vacation theme song Holiday Road, which, in my defense, is what plays when Christy Brinkley appears in the Vegas Vacation movie years later. But apparently this isn't the case. This isn't what plays in the original Vacation movie when she appears. The truth is actually even weirder in the theatrical release. In the early home video version of Vacation, the song that plays when Christy Brinkley appears is I'm So Excited about the Pointer Sisters, But on future releases the song is swapped out for a song by June Pointer, one of the Pointer sisters, called little Boy Sweet. I don't know why this is that. I've never been able to find a satisfactory explanation. I'm imagining it's some kind of licensing issue, but does I'm So Excited really cost that much?

01:14:46
Speaker 2: I mean, the top goour result for the Little Boy Sweet is the YouTube clip for this film, and then second to that, it's a SoundCloud link for the vinyl restoration rip.

01:15:00
Speaker 1: Of the song.

01:15:01
Speaker 2: So for those of you who are online terminally online, that should give you an indication of the popularity of that song.

01:15:11
Speaker 1: It's a good song. It's just weird that, like I mean, I'm So Excited was so perfect and I don't know why they changed it. But anyhow, while we're over here, we got to talk about the theme song of the movie Holiday Road. Oh song I Love So Dearly. Even though it sounds like something that the Brian Wilson obsessed Lindsey Buckingham just crapped out one day at a cocaine induced fugue state while testing out his new home studio equipment, which, to be real, is basically what happened. This was nineteen eighty three, an era when every comedy needed a catchy theme tune from a bland white dude separated from his more interesting seventies musical outlet. See Kenny Loggins doing the Gopher dance song I'm Alright in Caddyshack, that song he goes, that song goes, Yes, it does. Kenny Loggins doing the theme for Footloose, Kenny Loggins doing danger Zone for Top Gun. Surely there must be other people who aren't Kenny Loggins. Did John Oates do any comedy theme songs in the eighties?

01:16:09
Speaker 2: Loggins as my undying loyalty though, Man, yeah, I mean, you know, giving me the best, the single best sound bite any celebrity has ever given me.

01:16:17
Speaker 1: Oh, remind me what that is. I forget.

01:16:19
Speaker 2: I don't have a lot of hope for the species when talking about climate change.

01:16:26
Speaker 1: That's right, you snuck a danger zone reference into the headline of that article you wrote. Was that for people? Or I feel a lot of guilt about Kenny Loggins because I it was the first time I ever did like a like an event where I was supposed to like talk to one person, but then they like when you got there, they just offered you time with another person. And I was too polite to say no, I don't really want to talk to Kenny Loggins. That's not why I'm here, and I have no questions for him. So I had no questions for him. I just tried to riff, which I as evidenced by all the episodes of this show that I meticulously script I'm not very good at. So that was like, so was it all right? Nobody worries about you. How's Jim Asina doing these days? So yeah, I talked to him for like twenty minutes about God does One and I never wrote anything about it, and I feel bad about it to this day.

01:17:22
Speaker 2: I think you're okay not having made any Yeah made hitty Hey from Loggins.

01:17:32
Speaker 1: This song boggles my mind. Dude. It's literally just Lindsey. Yeah. He plays every single instrument and sings every part, which is nuts. I mean well, I mean the funny part is Harold Raimis wanted Fleet with Mac. They just released Mirage in nineteen eighty two. Band relations were really at their I say, there's so many lows in terms of band relation for Fleetwood Mac, but this was certainly one of the lowest lows. They wouldn't record a new album together for five years. Getting them all together in a room was just not gonna happen. So they went with Lindsay, who was initially very reluctant. He believed that soundtrack work quote wasn't part of his discipline, but ultimately he honored the request and recorded Holiday Road, as you said, playing all the instruments himself, without actually seeing the movie first. He didn't even I don't know if it wasn't available or if he just deemed it beneath him to not feel like watching the movie that he was spreading the theme song for. It's just so funny to me because.

01:18:27
Speaker 2: He he went with the choice of using the dog barks for the on the Fairlight CMI, which is famously the synthesizer that Kate Bush used, Oh yeah, and also included her synthesized dog barks on Hounds of Love.

01:18:46
Speaker 1: You know, Oh my god, you're right, oh on Hounds of Love.

01:18:52
Speaker 2: And it's just so damn funny to me that those two people used synthesized fair Light dog barks on two nineteen eighties pop hits from around the same time, but only one of them was tied to a movie in which the dog dies.

01:19:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, he had no idea that there was a scene where a dog is accidentally dragged to its death with one plumper of a car, which is what I like to call, to borrow a phrase from Bob Ross, a happy accident Oh yeah. I mean he had that blue hair of Ramis's mind when he heard the song and was like, Linday didn't even watch the movie. But it ends with dog barkings. This is great. Some internet sleuths have a pet theory. See what I did there that the dog heard at the end of the song is the same one on the cover of nineteen seventy nine's Fleetwood Mac album Tusk, which belonged to producer Ken Kelly.

01:19:45
Speaker 2: It's better than the theory that it was Mick Fleetwood's dick, which is what the song Tusk is actually about.

01:19:52
Speaker 1: God, I love the song Tusk Love. That is a great song and the video for that where they're playing with the usc Trojans.

01:20:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, Buddy super super and the live one when he's in his top hat Era, Yeah, super coked farmer, farmer hat Era, super coked out of his gourd.

01:20:12
Speaker 1: That is one of the most toy songs.

01:20:15
Speaker 2: It's insane, It's like it's grinding teeth. The soundtrack.

01:20:20
Speaker 1: Is that Kobe Khaleaid's dad, Yes, Yes, ah.

01:20:24
Speaker 2: Nepotism, How did You Well?

01:20:26
Speaker 1: Or? One of the first episodes we ever taped was fleet with Max Rumors and identified and you were like, I have no idea who that is, but somehow, in the space of the last eighteen months you've learned.

01:20:38
Speaker 2: It's because I'm I'm learning Jordan. Every piece of nepotism baby info gets filed into my database and internalized.

01:20:49
Speaker 1: For when the revolution comes.

01:20:53
Speaker 2: No, it's just wild to me that h Lindsay's understanding of the movie was that it should be somewhat up and a little bit funny, and so he was like, I'll put a dog bark in.

01:21:06
Speaker 1: And then.

01:21:09
Speaker 2: Featuring a notable dog death, just the perfect curb your enthusiasm theme song drop moment for Lindsey. Sadly not a hit, though sadly not as much of a hit as I would have thought.

01:21:24
Speaker 1: It would have been. I know it only got to number eighty two on Billboard, which may have contributed to Lindsay's decision to say no to Harold Ramis when he came knocking again a few years later looking for a title theme.

01:21:35
Speaker 2: To Ghostbusters Incredible? Can you imagine the song Ghostbusters sung by Lindsey Buckingham ghost Stop.

01:21:43
Speaker 1: Scout, scout scous.

01:21:46
Speaker 2: Busters like just coked out of his gorge, screaming fingerpicked acoustic guitar super high in the mix.

01:21:57
Speaker 1: Well I missed that.

01:21:58
Speaker 2: What a missed opportunity, as he later explained, Nah, you know I did this really well once the soundtrack Vacation.

01:22:06
Speaker 1: It's not something I want to get into as a repetitive part of my identity.

01:22:12
Speaker 2: Incredible reverse engineering backwards Monday morning quarterbacking. You know, I didn't want to do the theme song to Ghostbusters, a theme song recognized in every corner of the world, because I really knocked it out of the park with my theme for Vacation.

01:22:29
Speaker 1: Have you heard the dogs at the end?

01:22:34
Speaker 2: As you meditate on that, We'll be right back with more too much information after these messages. All right, Well, I'm gonna use your segue here, even though it has absolutely no bearing on what we were just talking about. On the topic of objectifying women. Now we have to talk about how Anthony Michael Hall was a horny purve during the filming of the scene where his on screen mom was taking a shower. In a two thousand and nine oral history of the film for Maxim, he described trying to be a discreet presence on the scene when Peverly DeAngelo was in the shower, only to get forcibly ejected by the producer phrasing, only to get squeezed squeezed off the set, Only to get squeezed out of the set by National Lampoon producer and head Honjo Mattie Simmons, who later recounted, I grabbed him by the shoulder and said, get the hell out of here, Get the hell out of here, jerking off to.

01:23:43
Speaker 1: Your on screen mom.

01:23:46
Speaker 2: Simmons was angry the young star would try to violate the privacy of a fellow cast member filming, and years later Hall didn't deny the allegation, saying I was totally trying to sneak a peek. Was I conflicted that she.

01:23:57
Speaker 1: Was playing my mom? You know what? At times I was fade out to the more you know star.

01:24:08
Speaker 2: He would add in the making of documentary, I had kind of a Freudian thing for her. Mattie Simmons would later recall that the room where Beverly D'Angelo changed was so far from the set, requiring that she walk a bit of a distance in nothing but a towel, which made him feel bad, but she laughed it off, saying, Oh, I'd done four hundred naked performances in hair for me walking across the set was nothing. There were several deleted scenes speaking of risque content that were shot but cut from a final version of the film. One had the camp comfort manager played by Brian Doyle Murray, dress up in a moose constume and sneak into Clark and Ellen's tent to scare them, explaining the quote unquote wildlife fun the manager mentions as they check in. That scene was cut because it made the sequence run too long, and so it was rewritten to have Dinky sneak into the tent instead. The second scene was one featuring two Native Americans, the same ones who see Clark wandering aimlessly through the desert and say what an ass as well as a camel rider who finds Ellen and the rest of the family and rescues them. That scene was cut because, as we mentioned earlier, the camel had been raised in Burbank and had only ever walked on pavement and not hot sand, and was therefore unable to do so. A poignant metaphor for Hollywood if I've ever heard one. Remnants of both cut scenes appear as photos during the ending credits photo montage, and there was another deleted scene that took place. After the redneck mechanics relieve Clark of all of his money, he mentions that they're going to run out of gas, and in this deleted scene that is exactly what happens. Clark, Ellen and the kids are forced to push the car with Edna still inside of it, to the nearest gas station. The attendant fills the car up with gas, and then Clark drives away very fast without paying for it because he has no money. Is also where Clark got those sandwiches, because later he tells Russ to get out the sandwiches he got at the gas station.

01:26:07
Speaker 1: That's my favorite line of this entire movie. Russ, can you have me one of those sandwiches from the gas station. I'm so hungry I can eat a sandwich from a gas station.

01:26:14
Speaker 2: Speaking of seeds that were cut, there's one that Harold Ramis wishes he'd cut, and that is the part where the Griswolds drive their station wagon through a rough neighborhood in Saint Louis.

01:26:24
Speaker 1: We can't close their eyes to the plight of the city. Kids, youre noticing all this plight. Gunshots sound okay, roll them up.

01:26:32
Speaker 2: It's a very actually like prec commentary on like white liberalism to being Yeah, well, we have to bear witness to this, but the second it gets too close, we install a ring and start calling the cops.

01:26:44
Speaker 1: Well, that was supposed to be the underlying intent of this scene, but it ended up just being insulting to everybody in it.

01:26:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, and obviously it comes across as an incredibly offensive today, and Ramis said on his commentary track that he was embarrassed by it. At the time time of the taping, he called it the most politically incorrect sequence I've ever shot, adding that it dehumanizes everyone involved. And before he died in twenty fourteen, he said if he would reshoot the movie in the twenty tens, he would lose that scene. Didn't They reshoot this movie in the twenty tens, and everyone collectively decided that we were going to ignore it.

01:27:18
Speaker 1: They did a reboot of it with Ed Helms as Rusty as like a grown up Rusty. We'll talk for about that at the end. Yeah, it didn't really well. I don't think National Lampoo had anything to do with it, and it Yeah, it wasn't good. I just want to add the scene in question, Clark stops for directions in this neighborhood and he gets relieved of his hubcaps.

01:27:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, not exactly the most advanced Yeah, and racial relations, adding insult to injury. There was a sign that was added to the set that read East Saint Louis, which was not the area that was actually supposed to be featured. So it was, you know, just casting further aspersions on East Saint Louis. But there's a funny story about the actor who plays the pimp in that scene who suggests, asks, recommends Clark to quote your mama. That actor Chris Jackson, got into the audition for this role by calling the production company and saying, Chevy Chase told me to call get when that worked. When the person on the other line said that Chase was in New York, Jackson made up a story about how Chase passed the message through mutual friends Richard Pryor and John Belushi. Then he said they told me about this ghetto scene without actually knowing that that was the role he was auditioning for, and that was enough to get him into the audition room. Incredible display of hutzpah. Yes, speaking of bit characters and insensitive depictions of the human condition. Now we have to talk about cousin Eddie, the rest of his clan not my favorite character in this movie. Considered casting Robin Williams and Kenneth Mahers in the role before going with Randy Quait, offering a masterclass in redneck stereotypes. He based cousin Eddie's trademark tongue click on a guy he knew in high school in Texas and marked every spot in the script where he wanted to incorporate the sound. His daughter, Vicky was played by future thirty rock star Jane Krakowski, the one who talks to Audrey about French kissing and adds daddy says, I'm the best at it. Their other daughter, who's born with no tongue and who quote whistles like a bird and eats like a horse, which is my favorite. Flannery O'Connor short story was played by Harold Raymis's real life daughter Violet. That's not the only immediate family cameo in the movie. Beverly d'angelo's husband at the time, Don Lorenzo Salviati. You can't convince me that guy wasn't convinced for racketeering and cigarettes smuggling and white planes. He makes a quick cameo as the piano player at the hotel where the skinny dipping scene takes place. The boy, though, who played cousin Dale John P. Navin Junior, has an arguably greater pop culture legacy. He is the very first voice ever heard on one of my favorite TV shows of all time, Cheers Baby. He appears in the nineteen eighty two Cheers Pilot as an underage patron posing as a Vietnam veteran with a fake ID, trying to get a drink from Sam Malone.

01:30:30
Speaker 1: And He's like, he looks like he's like ten. That's like the joke. It's pretty funny. I put that fact in there for you. I know you love Cheers. Thank You? Is that the joke? Jordan? That is the joke? Ted? That is the joke Ted.

01:30:44
Speaker 2: Finally, at long last in the film, the Griswolds arrive at their own personal El Dorado Wally World, only to have an anthropomorphic moose voiced by director hald Raimis informed them that it is closed for two weeks for repairs, and that was one of the reasons that the location was filmed because Disneyland never closes except for I think Christmas Day.

01:31:06
Speaker 1: Oh maybe that's.

01:31:07
Speaker 2: Like the literal only holiday that this staff get prior to the pandemic. Of course, for the production, this was the end of the journey. They shot around la for the last two weeks of filming. The Wally World parking lot scene was shot at the Santa Anita Racetrack in Arcadia at California, and the slightly over exaggerated quasi mystical park scene in the background was created through the use of a matte painting in keeping with the theme of production. It was oppressively hot the day that they shot Rusty and Clark racing through the parking lot to the Chariots of Fire theme, which is touch I've always lot. I think I heard it in this film before I heard it in Chariots of Fire.

01:31:50
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely, yeah, me too.

01:31:52
Speaker 2: Harold Bramus claims that the temperature in California that day was one hundred and five degrees and the pavement at the Santa Anita Race was a scorching one hundred and thirty degrees. Anthony Michael Hall foolishly tried to race Chevy Chase, who is six feet plus to the gates and for his efforts, he received heat stroke and hospitalization.

01:32:19
Speaker 1: There is a long loss never seen ending to vacation, which is far darker than the one we know in Love. This one is more in line with John Hughes's original short story. For the original ending, Clark is so enraged that Wally World is closed that he buys a BB gun and storms Wallyworld founder Roy Wally's Beverly Hills home thanks to a map of the stars that he buys. After finding Roy Wally on the back patio having a meeting with some of his associates, Clark waves his BB gun around and forces them to sing and dance to Marty Moose songs in a desperate attempt to entertain his family and get his dimes worth of joy. Roy Wally, of course, is an obvious nod to Walt Disney. He's got Walt It' mustache and is probably named after Walt's brother, Roy, who took over the Disney empire following Walt's premature death in nineteen sixty six. Roy Wally was played by longtime Preston Sturge's leading man Eddie Bracken, a legendary comedian of the forties and fifties, who is probably best familiar to me thanks to his role in another John Hughes Penns comedy Home Alone two Lost in New York, where he plays the role of Mister Duncan, owner of Duncan's Toy Chest. But back to vacation, the police arrived to take Clark away, but then, according to one version of the ending, at least the blonde in the Ferrari arrives to save the day. She is Roy Wally's daughter, and she talks him out of pressing charges and they have a heart to heart with Roy Wally and everything ends great, and the final scene features the Grids Walts on an airplane presumably the family truckster has finally died once and for all, wearing Marty Moose hats and talking about how they need to add the Wallys to their Christmas card list. Then the flight attendant announces on the PA that the flight is headed NonStop to Atlanta and not the Griswolds home of Chicago. Clark realizes they're on the wrong plane and starts to have a very loud meltdown. Then it cuts to the runway and you hear the sound of pilot's radio in ground control for backup security due to a cabin disruption. Kind of funny, right, I mean, especially the call back to the woman in the Ferrari is pretty clever. But as good as this ending seems on paper, test audiences hated it. Harold Ramis recalled the audience howling throughout the first test screenings, only to sit stone faced for the final twenty minutes, and his theory was that the audience had invested so much in getting to Wally World that they were really disappointed and slightly betrayed that it didn't happen. So we had to rethink the whole end of the movie, he said, And they roped in John Hughes and caged half a million dollars from the studio for reshoots. And this original ending has never been released to the public, although Chevy Chase claims that he still has a VHS with the original cut at home. But interestingly, Vacation's original ending was repurposed for Christmas Vacation, where cousin Eddie Randy Quaid kidnaps Clark's boss and drags him to the Griswold home, so it reads some of that the new ending for Vacation was shot many months after the production had initially wrapped. I've seen somewhere between four and eight months, and a might a problem with this was that Anthony Michael Hall went through a serious growth spurt and grew three inches during this time. He'll notice that for the first part of the movie he's shorter than his on screen mother, but then during scenes shot in Wally World, he towers over her. Reportedly, this was part of the reason why Rusty became the older sibling in the movie, although he was initially written as the younger sibling and Audrey was older. Predictably, Chevy, who is known for zeroing in on people's sensitivities, teased Anthony Michael Hall about this all mercilessly. Puberty kicked in hard. Haul recalled, Chevy didn't make it a smooth transition for me. He immediately joked about a huge pimple I had.

01:36:04
Speaker 2: This is the guy who told Bill Murray, Uh. Famously, acne scarred Bill Murray, your face looks like something that Apollo thirteen should land on or something like that, right, and Bill.

01:36:14
Speaker 1: John walked on, yeah, yeah, yes, uh. He also gave Anthony milcahol a signed photo at the end of the production, reading Michael, if you're going blind, you're doing it right. Charming, but on some more pleasant topics, John Candy loves John Candy. When it came down to do the reshoots for Vacation, Harold Ramis asked his old SCTV buddy John Candy to play a hapless security guard who is based on a bully type character that John Candy had played on SETV called Paul Fist in your face. Uh, this seems crazy, but it was confirmed. In the making of documentary for Vacation, John Candy's agent asked for after Evil Voice one million dollars for what was just half a notch above a cameo. The production only had half a million dollars for reshoots, so producer Maddy Simmons had to go and ask for another million dollars for John Candy. I didn't even realize he was that big of a deal at this time, in nineteen eighty three. I didn't think he was. This was pre Uncle Buck, pre planes, trains and automobiles, pre all sorts of stuff, But yes, he was. Hilariously, A Wally World water park opened in Ontario a few years after Vacation was released. And the owners wanted to hire John Candy to come to the opening. He's you know, not only was he in he's the cardy guard for Wallyworld on the big screen, but he was also from Ontario, I believe. But they could not afford his appearance fee, which given that he got a million bucks in nineteen eighty three, which is like, it's gotta be like three four million dollars now, right with inflation for like eight minutes of screen time. Write up his nose. Oh yeah. Fans of the movie know that Clark holds the security guard hostage and forces him to ride the roller coasters as he finally delivers on his promise of a fun day at wally World for his family. And you'll notice that everyone looks a little green when they're riding these coasters. That's because they had to ride them something like seven or eight times and everyone wanted to vomit by the end of it. Anthony Michael Hall has said that the scenes where Russy looks terrified are one hundred percent real and there's no acting going on. Dana Baron, who played Audrey, was hit especially hard. She needed to take motion sickness medication and lie down on a bench between takes. Beverly D'Angelo reportedly barely went on it at all and just made her stunt double do it. But ultimately it was all worth it because this was the final brushstroke on a comedic masterpiece. National Lampoon's Vacation was released on July twenty ninth, nineteen eighty three, forty years ago, viewing at number one at the box office and beating out Return of the Jedi and one of the Jaws sequels. I forget which one, both of which had been out for some time at that point. It's worth adding Harold Ramis was on Martha's vineyard finishing the writing of Ghostbusters when the studio called to say they had a good weekend. Vacation was the year's third highest grossing comedy, earning sixty one point four million. Only trading Places and Mister Mom performed better. Mister Mom was also written by John Hughes, and Vacation certainly lived up through his epic poster by legendary artist Boris Fallejo, who delivered a hyperrealistic oil painting parodying similar ones he'd done for Conan the Barbarian and Star.

01:39:42
Speaker 2: Wars Empire strikes Back. He did Barborella. That was his first that was his first Yeare movie, first commission. And what's even crazier to me is that I love this. This is my favorite Arab movie poster. Drew Strusan, who did all the Raiders Lost Ark and they belong in this milieu.

01:39:59
Speaker 1: This for me, you know.

01:40:02
Speaker 2: But Vallejo did stuff for Larry Cohen. It was an exploitation here. He did this tremendous art of Ed Harris in Knight's Armor on a motorcycle for George A. Romero's Night Riders. But Valleo actually married another poster artist, uh, fantasy artist named Julie Bell. They married in nineteen ninety four and they are co authors and artists in fantasy erotica. Uh. And they actually co postered the Aquitine Hunger Forest movie, the first one, which is a you know, an homage to the style of of poster that Vallejo you know, pioneered in the in the in the eighties. But yeah, love his art. Well worth looking up all of his stuff.

01:40:53
Speaker 1: You know.

01:40:53
Speaker 2: He did beat Death Stalker. Uh, he did c the Winged Serpent. I mean all of these beautiful lush oil paintings from the eighties Charles Bronson movie called The White Buffalo just a bygone era, and he also did European Vacation.

01:41:11
Speaker 1: You know, I mean, they're very it's worth saying, very uh, very sexual paintings.

01:41:16
Speaker 2: Oh extremely yeah, very very much, extremely ironically charged.

01:41:21
Speaker 1: Clark is depicted as a shirtless warrior, waving a tennis racket for some reason instead of a sword, and gripping his luggage while his huddled family cling to him for strength. And you know, it's it's perfect. This is how Clark sees himself as he endures his quest for fun. Per his website, they are accepting corporate and private commissions. So I just want to say, oh my god, for your birthday, dude.

01:41:48
Speaker 2: They're so horny. They're so horny and so weird. I'm gonna put this one in the chat. It's gonna make you so unco comfortable. You're so uncomfortable with this stuff.

01:42:02
Speaker 1: I love it. I'm gonna start saying these to you unsolicited. Oh wow, I mean you know what it is. It looks like, oh wow, that Saturday Night Live commercial with the twin toilets so naked.

01:42:16
Speaker 2: Their website is boris Julie dot com. So, if you were a loved one wants to get one or both members of the TMI creative a Boris Vallejo oil painting, go to www dot Boris Julie dot com.

01:42:34
Speaker 1: Julie's like in her twenties and Boris is like.

01:42:37
Speaker 2: Yep, I'm sure it's weird. Don't read more into it, Jordan, everyone knows that Vacation had several sequels, nineteen eighty five's European Vacation, nineteen eighty nine's Christmas Vacation, and nineteen ninety seven's Vegas Vacation. I didn't realize I was ninety seven, Holy same year I was seeing Independence Day, they were making another Vacation movie.

01:42:55
Speaker 1: That's wild.

01:42:56
Speaker 2: Plus the twenty fifteen reboot, which starred Ed Helms and was not handled by National Letpoon.

01:43:02
Speaker 1: So not can it consider it? Yeah? Exactly no.

01:43:06
Speaker 2: But it does feature a reunion of the core Freaks and Geeks trio. Uh, we'll just keep skipping over that. John Hughes was so uninvolved in European Vacation, however, that he had no idea it was on its way until he saw a commercial for it on TV. Oh incredible, Since it had incorporated unused elements from his previous Vacation script. He petitioned the Writer's Guild of America to award him a writing credit. Despite this arbitration, he would come back for Christmas Vacation, which is a much better movie. And then there's Vegas Vacation, which was a contractual avlcation movie for Chevy Chase. To keep him from getting sued, he owed Warner Brothers another movie from a three picture deal, and continually rejected every script until he was finally said yes to a third vacation fourth vacation movie, Sunrise Sunset. But European Vacation featured Monty Python's Eric Idyl, which sparked a brief writing collaboration between Idle and Chase on a script for Australian Vacation, apparently plenty of shark gags, but it ultimately didn't pan out, possibly because the eighties had seen a surfeit of Australian panic movies with with crocodile Dundee yes and the commercial dominance of a CDC. There was also a script written where Clark and Ellen get divorced and then need to take a cross country road trip to get to Audrey's wedding.

01:44:44
Speaker 1: Isn't the plot of that fucking odd couple sequel?

01:44:47
Speaker 2: Oh no, I was gonna say Destination Wedding that just came out this year with George Clooney and Julie Roberts, their divorced couple who has to go to their daughter's destination wedding.

01:44:56
Speaker 1: In this quote from Beverly D'Angelo. I cut it out, She reafed, friends, like, wait a minute, that's a George Cloney movie too. I wonder if I and I cut that part out of the quote. But yeah, maybe that the idea either got recycled or somebody got somebody got grabby a bitch ah.

01:45:16
Speaker 2: She said, here's the thing about beverly' angelo. In an interview about the unproduced script, she said, here's the thing about demographics. I think they didn't want old people in it or something. There was, however, a fourteen minute short film released in twenty ten as part of a promotional campaign for travel rental site called Hotel Hell Vacation. That that's not a typo. No, that's that's that's just a bad title. It's like the signs of the Lamb's House in Pennsylvania, yep, and which Clark and Ellen get away for a second honeymoon is a giant, half assed ad. And uh, that's it. That's it, folks, That's all she wrote. There was also a two thousand and three made for TV movie called National Lampoon's Christmas Faking two, centering around Randy Quaid's uncle Eddie and Miriam Flynn as his wife Katherine as they celebrate Christmas on an island in the South Pacific. Somehow they got the original Audrey Dana Barron back on board for this, and most recently, a television series titled The Griswolds entered development at HBO.

01:46:21
Speaker 1: Max.

01:46:22
Speaker 2: Oh, we can't say that anymore now, it's just Max since they got bought by Discovery, Warner AT and T, Haliburton, CIA dot Gov, Amazon, River and conglomerate nightmare we all live in these days, ah, starring National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation star Johnny Galecki of The Big Bane, Fiery Roseanne and Roseanne and I know what you did last summer, all right? As executive producer. Who knows what's up with that? Who doesn't matter? None of this matters, Jordan, What the hell happened in National Lampoon.

01:47:05
Speaker 1: It's funny you should ask Kigel. I mentioned earlier that National Lampoon was not involved in the Ed Helms helmed Ooh like That It's Midnight My Time. I still got it, the Ed Helms helmed reboot of the franchise in twenty fifteen. They also removed their name from Vegas Vacation in nineteen ninety seven due to a falling out with the original Vacation producer and former Lampoon co owner Maddy Simmons. Frankly, by the late nineties, the prefix National Lampoon was something of a liability, since their movies by this point kind of sucked. This leads us to a bigger question what happened to the National Lampoon. By the nineties they were hemorrhaging money and the magazine was shuddered in nineteen ninety eight, and really the last truly quality hit movie that National Lampoon had was Christmas Vacation in nineteen eighty nine. Beyond that, basically sound like entries in a porn franchise. National Lampoon's Senior Trip, National Lampoon's Jake's Booty Call, National Lampoons replicate something about multiple people named Kate, although there's a Men in Black parody called men and White, which sounds medium pony at least thanks to the title men and White like men and White coats? Is it set in the South? I was thinking more like doctors in a psych word. But oh sure, yeah sure, but you know what, I didn't actually watch it, so you guys should cut that part anyway? Who did? Then? In two thousand and two, the gross out college comedy Van Wilder took in forty million dollars at the box office, which led National Lampoon to pursue friddy comedies ever after. Who could forget National Lampoons Barely Legal, National Lampoons presents Cattle Call, which is about porn, not livestock. National Lampoon's Gold diff National Lampoon's Dorm Days, National Lampoons at Differs.

01:49:06
Speaker 2: I thought you were a sundowning there and you mispronounced something. It's called gold differs or dilfers, like dad, I'd like to or like it's got to be gold diggers, right, Yeah, it is gold diggers, Okay, I was I was sundowning earlier about this?

01:49:24
Speaker 1: Uh. National Lampoon Electric Apricot Quest for Fresteral. They made that starring uh Less Claypool.

01:49:32
Speaker 2: Oh my man, yeah, one of my somehow that a DVD copy that ended up my college house and we watched that as a notable for the feature of Less Claypool playing drums and waxing, uh philosophical about a band that he that his characters in and saying, well, you know, they say you've got forever to make your first album, but it's like you've they say you've also got like forever to make your first sandwich. Then you you have that fun to make your second sandwiches. Yeah, it's not very good, but it does have Less Claypool in it, playing drums, not bass, the instrument to which he is most associated. Where Were You Sorry?

01:50:13
Speaker 1: It's also National Lampoon, Beach Party, at the Threshold of Hell and the rest. Following their twenty fifteen retrospective documentary National Lampoon, Drunk, Stoned, Brilliant and Dead, they have not been active in the film or TV industry, which might be the best. But a sadder fate lay in store for Randy Quaid. In September twenty ten, he and his wife Evy were charged with burglary after they spent five days occupying the guest house in a vacant home they once owned in Santa Barbara. They claimed that the home was wrongfully transferred to a third party by use of a forged signature. After that, they fled to Canada, where his wife held citizenship, but were arrested on suspicion of gration violations of Vancouver. Before being released. US prosecutors declimb the press charges for their felony illegal squatting charge, and for a time they lived in hiding fearful of a gang of quote.

01:51:13
Speaker 2: Star Whackers truly one of my favorite back celebrity quotes of all time, and he doubled and tripled down on it. Not a single person in this man's orbit said Randy, really think about that phrase, think about the implications of star whackers.

01:51:32
Speaker 1: He didn't. He claimed that people were trying to whack him off, trying trying to assassinate him. A couple of God knows him, star whackers. Yeah, it's like. This is also the subject of an unreleased documentary that he produced and starred in, which is to date his one of his last major film projects. He was in a indie movie like six years ago, and in the midst of all this so began a series of legal and immigration problems. So, in a move mirroring a scene in Vacation, he called Chevy Chase for financial help. How much you need, Eddie about fifty thousand dollars.

01:52:17
Speaker 2: Chase.

01:52:19
Speaker 1: Chase said he declined to contribute to Randy Quaid's legal defunds funds. He said, there are funny people, and God knows, Randy's one of them. I don't know what happens, but I pray for him. And Chevy also semi jokingly, semi seriously mentioned in interviews that he's come up with a Vacation spinoff. He calls Clark and Ellen save Randy instead of cousin Eddie. It's just Randy now, and they go rescue him from the star Whackers. But you know, I'll say, the fact that Randy Quaid reached out to Chevy, who's you know, not exactly known as the cuddliest man in Hollywood speaks volumes about the close bond between the castifaication. Dana Baron says that the OG Vacation crews still get together, and she said it's the best rapport of actors I've ever seen. They recently gathered together for a pool party, she said. Beverly and her twins hung out with my kids and swam and Chevy has literally every year for over thirty years, sent me a Christmas card with his wife, Michael. I'm guessing Anthony. Michael Hall and I text all the time and email. Hall guest starred in two episodes of Community, which starred Chevy for a time before he was victoriously ousted from the production. But Chevy apparently he does this thing when he sees old friends where he pretends he doesn't recognize them and then demands a cup of coffee from them as if they're just an intern. Hilarious, which Anthony milcahol says he finds hilarious. He said, I felt like Rusty all over again. That's Chevy's sense of humor, And you know what, I feel like a disrespectful Chevy Chase non joke. It's a perfect place to leave this.

01:53:58
Speaker 2: We've all had so much fun. We're gonna need plastic surgers who move up Damn smiles whistling zippity doo dah out of our ask folks, thank you for listening.

01:54:13
Speaker 1: This has been too much information. I'm Alex Heigel and you're not. And I'm Jordan Bruntalg. We'll catch you next time. Don't touch too much Information was a production of iHeartRadio.

01:54:31
Speaker 2: The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalg. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Bruntalg and Alex Heigel.

01:54:41
Speaker 1: With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Punk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Back Back, Bat and Fresh