“Well I’ll tell you something, this is no longer a vacation. It’s a quest. It’s a quest for fun!”
Family vacations are a cornerstone of growing up. They’re not always glamorous. Sometimes you just go camping or visit an Aunt. But once in a while, your parents spring for a vacation you’ll talk about for the rest of your life: a Universal Studios, a week in Paris, a Disneyland, or, perhaps, a Wally World, as the Griswolds set out to visit during National Lampoon’s Vacation. Now, not every family has a patriarch like Chevy Chase‘s Clark Griswold, but beneath the chaos and borderline psychotic behavior is a well-intentioned, loving father who wants nothing more than to give his kids “the perfect vacation.” How can we fault him for that?
John Hughes and “Vacation ’58”
Like most classic comedies from the ’80s, National Lampoon’s Vacation is the brainchild of John Hughes, who has more hits to his name than letters. Released alongside Mr. Mom in 1983, Vacation is the start of what would become a defining decade for Hughes.
The comedy movie is based on a short story titled “Vacation ’85” that Hughes wrote for National Lampoon magazine. There are a lot of similarities between Hughes’ story and the finished film, such as the fate of the Aunt’s poor dog (and the Aunt herself) and driving off the 4′ cliff, but also a lot of differences. In the story, the family actually visits Disneyland, and the dad’s confrontation is with Mr. Disney himself. For obvious legal reasons, the movie created the fictitious Roy Walley, the owner of Wally World. The dad in the story also gets it a lot worse at the end, being charged with attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, illegal use of a firearm, and two violations of the Beverly Hills noise code. Clark certainly got off easy in the movie, huh.
However, the biggest change from page to screen didn’t actually come from Hughes, who wrote the first draft of the Vacation screenplay for Warner Bros. Instead, it was the movie’s director Harold Ramis and Chevy Chase who decided to reframe the story from the father’s point of view rather than the son’s. It’s arguably the greatest change that could have been made to Hughes’ story, as the father is the driving force for everything that happens. It makes sense for Vacation to be centered around him and his “quest for fun.”
Clark Griswold: A Man Many Fathers Can Relate To
A lot can be said about how Vacation redefined the family road-trip comedy or exposed the cracks in the Reagan-era nuclear family ideals and commercialized leisure, but that’s not why this movie is important, at least in my opinion. The importance of National Lampoon’s Vacation lies with one man, Chevy Chase, and his character, Clark Griswold.
After a season and a bit of Saturday Night Live, Chase was beginning to establish himself as a film star. He had a few early wins with Foul Play and Caddyshack, but Vacation took his career to another level, and for good reason. Clark Griswold is just so damn relatable.
Here is a man who is trying to do right for his family, but is getting bent over at every turn. First at the dealership, then at his cousin-in-law’s, then by Wally World itself. Vacation is the perfect example of life just giving you lemon after lemon, and then when you finally make the lemonade, life tries to drown you in it.
However, Clark tries to take these mishaps in stride. He bites his tongue (the best he can) with his wife’s family; he improvizes when funds are running low; and when it all does start to get to him, here comes Christie Brinkley’s beautiful woman in the red Ferrari to give him a sweet, if brief reprieve.
At face value, Vacation is what its title suggests, a family vacation comedy, but at its heart, it’s a story of fatherhood. Clark represents the good, the bad, and everything in between that comes with being a father. Chase knows when to play the chaos for laughs and when to dial back and show the audience that there are good intentions behind Clark’s manic decisions. While the rest of the cast are pitch-perfect in their roles, this is Chase’s movie through and through.
Audiences Are Still Taking Vacations With the Griswolds 40+ Years Later
Vacation was a box office hit. It grossed more than $60 million domestically against a $15 million budget. That’s the type of success that creates franchises, and that’s exactly what happened. Audiences were forced to suffer through 1985’s European Vacation, which began the tradition of recasting the Griswold children for every installment, but the studio made up for that misfire with 1989’s Christmas Vacation.
Christmas Vacation has arguably surpassed the original in terms of popularity. It may not be as important to the history of film, Hughes’ career, or the National Lampoon brand in general, but it’s got a better (and bigger) role for Randy Quaid’s Cousin Eddie and once again features Clark trying to give the “perfect” vacation, just this time at home during the holidays.
It’s unclear what exactly the future holds for the Griswolds. While it has its fans, Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley’s Vacation reboot in 2015 failed to bring the Griswolds truly back to the big screen. Instead, the franchise is in a weird limbo of only being revived for commercials or spoofed in TV shows. If the original cast of Vacation never does reprise their roles again for one last film, at least we’ll always have the original (and Christmas) to throw on. And honestly, that sounds pretty good to me.
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