For years this was our movie. I don’t know if we ever owned a copy of it, but it was 2002/2003 when a clerk at a Family Video in Bettendorf, Iowa told us to check it out. Rentals were a dollar. It was a great investment. I didn’t live in Bettendorf, but was with a college friend on a weekend trip (or something like that) back to his parents’ place. The visits came and went, but the movie stuck with me ever since.
In the supplemental features on the Blu-ray, Janeane Garofalo (interviewed at the time of filming) has a throw away comment about how Wet Hot American Summer could become a generation’s Caddyshack. I think she was right. Had Netflix existed twenty years ago in the form it does now, maybe they’d have rebooted Caddyshack as an original series that couldn’t have possibly satisfied diehard fans of the original, as was the case for me with the series they rolled out a few years back. As is though, the original Wet Hot has developed into something like a comedic Bible for me: For ages I would do my best to spread The Good News™, advocating for others to open their hearts to its unique brand of bizarre. “Oh, fuck my cock” isn’t exactly scripture, but it had a greater impact on my life than any Bible verse ever did, when casually leaked from the lips of an actor I only knew as the tightly wound Niles Crane to that point in my life. The movie has countless moments just like that which I’ve carried with me ever since my first viewing. The list of ways it’s influenced my own comedic tastes are boundless, but Wet Hot American Summer also skewed progressive and thoughtful with cutting views on topics ranging from homosexuality to male friendship and self-acceptance, all the way down to Beekeeper kid-types who would seed a forthcoming podcasting boom, lampooning quirky loners dying for an audience without a shred of desire to do the work to find that audience. There’s a lot actually packed into its 90 minute run-time.
Wet Hot was also my introduction to the Michaels. I say that, but my mental timeline is probably a little off: I remember Michael Ian Black from VH1’s Best Week Ever, but through this movie I later became aware of Stella, leading me to follow along with releases of grainy, low-res web series clips online and telling anyone who was willing to listen to me about my discovery. I loved Michael Ian Black’s 2007 album I Am A Wonderful Man, but it was Michael Showalter’s release from the same year called Sandwiches & Cats that landed me a brief online brush with greatness. In keeping with the times, I’d written a brief blog post about one of Showalter’s tracks I’d been keeping on repeat called “Erotica,” calling it “pretty much the musical equivalent to Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou… only better.” As with most blogging from that era, it was a hastily thrown together idea posted with lax editing and a casual regard for its consequences. I couldn’t have foreseen what happened next.
Questionable as the content or its delivery might have been, it crossed the desk of someone at Comedy Central who was spearheading a campaign to market the album online. “In the future,” read the promotional kick-off, “tours to promote new comedy albums will be simply injected into our consciousness along with our daily mind-control serum and Soylent Nutrition. But in the present, promotional tours have moved from record stores to blogs. At least that’s the case with Michael Showalter’s new album Sandwiches & Cats, which releases today. That’s right, Michael Showalter will be invading a slew of the internet’s most beloved weblogs today with the singular goal of convincing you, the consumer, to consume his record.” That included my blog, where Showalter wrote an article responding to mine in a sort of digital call and response. I was such a huge fan of his at the time (still am!), and loved so much about all the different projects he was working on in those years. However small a moment that was, it remains a lifelong blogging highlight for me. I ended up going to Black and Showalter’s show in Minneapolis at the Pantages Theatre, but as was customary at the time, my over-indulgences left me with little recollection of the event thereafter. C’est la vie.
All of this isn’t to mention the brilliance from cast members the likes of Christopher Meloni, Paul Rudd, or Molly Shannon, who each made Wet Hot what it was. It’s truly an ensemble production and without each of its individual components and contributions it surely wouldn’t have been what it was and has since become. What a strange movie to carry so much influence in someone’s life, but I’ve endlessly quoted this thing since college and still look for that ability in others as shorthand for being “my kind of person.” This movie built a tribe to which I feel I belong.
This article is part of Best of the Best, an ongoing series reflecting on and ranking my favorite music and movies.