National Lampoon's Vacation

Hey, Do You Remember...?

Christopher Schrader

Tv & Film, Comedy

4.8 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 22 July 2016

⏱️ 111 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Since the last few weeks have been filled with ninja turtles, aliens, and vampires, we decided it was time for a vacation. So we crammed into our metallic pea family truckster, loaded a Lindsey Buckingham cassette into the tape deck, and hit the open road for a look back at National Lampoon's Vacation.

All three of us were introduced to the movie at a fairly young age, but it was the repeat viewings that cemented its reputation as one of the all-time great screwball comedies. Which is not to say there aren't certain elements that definitely play differently now than they did in 1983. Because there are. A whole lot of them. But the film still works on so many other levels and even manages to sneak in a pretty powerful message about nostalgia as well.

Topics include: the original short story by John Hughes that this is based on, the pros and cons of turning Clark into the main character instead of Rusty, that notorious stop in St. Louis, the one big problem with the dream girl subplot, the unparalleled talent of mid-80s Chevy Chase, why the kids were recast in the sequels, the original ending and what it says about our obsession with "the good old days", the unbelievably simple reason the movie still works in spite of its issues, and much much more!

iTunes / Stitcher / RSS / Facebook / Twitter / Instagram

About The Show

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey, do you remember National Lampoon's vacation?
0:07.0	Hello and welcome to Hey Do You Remember, a show where we reminisce about a movie or TV series we grew up with, then take off the rose-tinted glasses to see how it holds up.
0:31.4	I'm Chris.
0:32.1	I'm Donna.
0:33.0	And I'm Carlos.
0:33.8	And today we're revisiting National Lampoon's Vacation.
0:52.3	Thank you. And today we're revisiting National Lampoon's Vacation. In the winter of 1979, a catastrophic blizzard left many residents of Northern Illinois snowbound.
0:59.0	One of them was John Hughes, an aspiring writer who at that point had already secured a steady
1:03.8	gig churning out what amounted to filler for the National Lampoon magazine, but whose full-time
1:08.7	job at a Chicago ad agency made it impossible to contribute
1:11.8	anything more substantial. And according to Hughes, that's how it would have continued had he not
1:16.5	been trapped indoors for three days straight by this terrible storm. Mercifully free from higher
1:21.9	ups looking over his shoulder, he finally had an opportunity to focus entirely on his writing.
1:27.3	There was a vacation-themed issue of
1:28.7	the lampoon on the horizon, and although Hughes knew he could borrow certain images and anecdotes
1:33.1	from his own childhood to help form a story, what he needed was a more fleshed-out structure.
1:38.0	And then he realized he already had one. It was sitting in the trunk of his car. He dug out his
1:43.2	Randy McNally Road Atlas, picked a starting
1:45.4	point and a destination, and began to imagine the stops you'd have to make along the way.
1:49.9	This laid the groundwork for Vacation 58, a piece of short fiction that details the misadventures
1:55.1	of the Griswold clan as they travel from Detroit to Disneyland. Werner Brothers purchased
1:59.8	the rights as soon as it was published,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Christopher Schrader, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Christopher Schrader and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.