You tell me: should a collector be absolutely precise and file this under N for ‘National Lampoon’s Animal House’ or ease up on being so exact and stick it under A for how it’s commonly known?
Obviously I’ve chosen the latter approach for a record that, let’s be honest, needn’t come down from the shelf very often. The movie is another matter; it’s an indisputable classic whose dialogue I could perform for you — not well, but probably accurately. That’s how many times I’ve seen this tasteless yet taste-making comedy, the bad grandpa of raunchy cinema, since I was a single-digit kid, who maybe shouldn’t have accompanied his dad to the theater that Labor Day weekend in Palm Springs. (My visions of his verging-on-uncontrollable laughter remain as vivid as the nude scenes, especially Belushi’s peeping-tom bit.) ‘Low humor of a high order’ is how Newsweek’s David Ansen described it, and in my estimation only ‘Fast Times at Ridgmont High’ has measured up to it minute for minute. But it pales by comparison to its jam-paced offspring in the soundtrack department. The two staples borrowed from Sam Cooke are best heard on Sam Cooke LPs; Belushi incomprehensibly hollering ‘Louie Louie’ and ‘Money’ is better off in pictures; and the rest are novelties I’m thankful to have in one place: Chris Montez’s ‘Let’s Dance,’ Bobby Lewis’s ‘Tossin’ and Turnin’,’ that too-cutesy Paul & Paula duet, Stephen Bishop’s Four Seasons-y title theme, and Otis Day and the Knights doing ‘Shout.’ And arguably more memorably than the Isleys themselves? Debate me.
#SoundtrackSunday 023
‘Animal House’
MCA, 1978
d: John Landis