Twenty-five years ago this July marked the release of the movie that made Dartmouth College famous. After a quarter-century, the Animal is back.
Written by Chris Miller '63, "National Lampoon's Animal House" has long been credited -- and blamed -- for perpetuating Dartmouth's image as a hard-drinking party school. But the 1978 cult film has nonetheless struck a chord with audiences far beyond Hanover, and a spate of events celebrating the anniversary of the movie classic are slated for late August.
A one-hour television special will air on TNN on August 24, while fans of the movie have planned an end-of-the-month celebration to be held in Cedar Grove, Ore., the hometown of the University of Oregon, where the movie was filmed.
Following on August 26, Universal Studios will release an anniversary-edition DVD of the movie. The original movie will remain unchanged, but the DVD will include several bonus clips including a "Delta Alumni Update," featuring the original actors playing their characters 25 years later, and "The yearbook: An Animal House reunion," describing the making of the film and some of the history behind it.
That history -- for better or for worse -- is intimately tied to Dartmouth and to Miller's experiences as a member of Alpha Delta fraternity in the early 1960s. The movie recounts the exploits of brothers at Delta House of the fictional Faber College, but Miller said that while the plaot is fictional, there are a surprising number of events bear a strong resemblance to things that happened at AD during his time in Hanover.
Miller co-wrote the film with Douglas Kennedy and Harold Ramis, but much of the college flavor came from Miller's own experiences, he said, since his co-writers had little direct experience with fraternity antics.
"One of them went to Harvard, the other went to George Washington University -- They didn't have anything like that there," Miller said. "The toga party was very Dartmouth-y, so was the road trip."
The part of the movie where Bluto pours mustard all over himself is based on a real event too, Miller noted in a past interview with The Dartmouth.
"One Sunday of Green Key weekend -- as everyone else was beginning to realize they had to return to real life the next day, a party still raged at AD, as people danced and sang to an R&B band," Miller said.
In the midst of this revelry, "Seal" discovered an industrial-sized bottle of mustard, and proceeded to pour it all over himself. He then started hopping around the dance floor on all fours, biting women's buttocks and shouting, "I am the Mustard Man. I am the goddamned Mustard Man."
Along with "Seal" and "Doberman," John "Bags" Bergman '63 was one of the real-life AD members that the character Bluto was based on.
Bergman, however, emphasized the fictional nature of the film.
"It was a great movie," he said, "based not-too-much on real events, though," he said.
There were a few events, however, that got transmitted from real life to the screen relatively intact, he noted.
The part of the movie, for example, where Otter poses as the boyfriend of a recently-deceased girl in order to land a sympathy date with her roommate was based on something that happened to him and his fraternity brothers while visiting the all-female Smith College, Bergman said.
"We were at the City Cafe in Northampton and one of the guys had the idea of asking this girl for a date," he said. "What happened in real life is they called the girl and used the name of a guy who had died at Dartmouth a couple of days before."
"She didn't think it was that funny," Bergman continued, "so the dean at Smith called the dean at Dartmouth and registered a complaint."
And even if some of the film's antics seem too over-the-top to be true, Miller said several of his experiences -- the actual antics, "not the toilet-trained stuff you saw in the movie," although incorporated into the script, never made it into the final version of the film.
"One Halloween, 'Marty,' who was a sophomore at the time, wanted to be accepted into the bosom of the fraternity. He had appropriated someone's jack o'lantern and was drinking with the guys. After a while 'Marty' got drunk and the brothers took all of his clothes off. He cut out the bottom of the jack o'lantern, sliced it from top to bottom and wrapped it around his waist -- of course, now it had a new nose," Miller said with a chuckle.
"Then they convinced him to go trick-or-treating. The first place he went was Chi Phi [now Chi Heorot] fraternity. They were good guys, but straighter than we were," he said. "On that night they were having the Dean of the College and his wife over for a sport-coat dinner. A student answered the door and was absolutely horrified to see 'Marty' and told him to get out before the Dean saw him. 'Marty' then went around to where the townspeople live and spent another hour trick-or-treating with the pumpkin on and the dean and the cops were trying to figure out who he was."
But 25 years later, he noted, many aspects of the College's social scene seem to have changed -- in some cases, drastically.
"When I was there, we didn't have to apply to anyone to get a keg, we just did it," Miller said. "If you got out of line big time, [the administration] would come down on you, but for little stuff you were winked at."
But Bergman played down the changes. "I don't know if the academics are more demanding or not," he said. "From what I gather, I feel like there's a more oppressive administrative presence than there used to be, but by and large, the changes aren't too big."
Members of AD, the Animal House inspiration itself, emphasized that they do their best to keep the spirit alive. Mike Liroff '05 said while most such zany house adventures are unprintable, one did involve a student walking down Tuck Mall in boxer shorts and a full-length white fur coat.
"My advice to you is to start drinking heavily," said Miller, who quoted Bluto and then paused a moment to add: "You're only going to go this way once, so wring every drop of fun out of it that you can." Meanwhile, Miller is currently writing a memoir of his time at Dartmouth and said he hopes to be finished sometime next year.
