'Animal House' fans back for anniversary toga party
They put a wrecking ball through the building that was Delta House on the University of Oregon campus.
Gentility has claimed the Dexter Lake Club, a semi-reputable roadhouse in the film and in real life. It's now an espresso and sandwich shop.
So what's left?
Toga! Toga! Toga!
Fond fans of the film broke out the robes at a town-sponsored toga party, intended to be the world's largest, to mark the film's 25th anniversary.
Yesterday, an "Animal House" parade crawled up Main Street, a small-town thoroughfare that still looks the same as it did in the movie.
Thousands lined the street in this town of about 8,000, chanting, "Toga, Toga!"
Dozens of residents who had bit parts in the film compared fading photographs and memories.
The party-animal award went to a John Belushi look-alike, Greg Hamilton, a health technician at a Portland hospital.
He said he became fascinated by "Animal House" while a student at the University of Oregon in the early 1990s, when he saw a hole, lovingly preserved, that Belushi had knocked in a fraternity-house wall with his guitar.
Elsewhere, Universal Studios marked the event with the release last week of the updated DVD "Animal House, Double Secret Probation Edition."
The National Lampoon-issued film came out of nowhere to end up as No. 36 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest film comedies. It earned more than $141 million.
Many of the actors also came from thin air, and some, such as Karen Allen ("Raiders of the Lost Ark"), Tim Matheson ("The West Wing"), Kevin Bacon ("Apollo 13") and director John Landis ("Blues Brothers," "Trading Places," "An American Werewolf in London"), have gone on to otherwise-distinguished movie and television careers.
Event organizers in Cottage Grove sought out actors who had bit parts in the film. Requests for tickets came from as far as New England.
The film is about the drunken, unruly lechers of Delta House, who made life at the uptight, buttoned-down and mercifully fictitious Faber College interesting for the rest of the students. They spent their days trying to keep themselves and their errant frat house on campus, and nights and weekends trolling for expulsion.
Sean McCartin, who was 14, played "Lucky Boy," the kid whose eyes were glued to a Playboy centerfold when a Playboy Bunny came flying off of a broken parade float through his bedroom window, knocking the wind out of him.
His response? "Thank you, God."
He's still saying it.
"Isn't that ironic?" he said. He and his wife founded the Eastside Faith Center, which now has about 700 members, in Eugene nine years ago.
"I do remember the set as a fun place to be," he said. "There wasn't a ton of pressure. It didn't seem like anybody expected much."
He recalled John Belushi's wife taking him shopping but said Belushi was about the only cast member he didn't meet.
"They totally cut my hair off," he said. "I lost my girlfriend over that."
The film's co-writer Chris Miller is a veteran of the old National Lampoon humor magazine, which was itself an exercise in irreverence. Many of the film's scenes and characters, he said are based on stories he did for the magazine.
Some, he said, are from his own fraternity experiences at Dartmouth in the early 1960s, when the movie is set, a time when the weightier issues of Vietnam and civil rights were still in their larval stages.
Miller gave this advice to today's college students: "You're only going to go through this once. Have all the fun you can possibly have."
He said he is not surprised that the movie has lasted.
"The movie at its deepest recesses is about freedom," Miller said, "the same way the Marx Brothers' movies are, and they have lasted."