Caddyshack; Baby Ruth bar

So I got that going for me, which is nice

Caddyshack (1980)

Director: Harold Ramis

Had I seen this before: No

Did I recognize the “famous quote” in the ad: I made an educated guess that was correct

The motion picture Caddyshack and I are exactly the same age, which is to say: sometimes funny but a real mess, both literally and figuratively sweaty, and probably more entertained by animal puppets than the general public. That’s right, it’s two comedies from 1980 in a row, which is going a long way in establishing my theory of authorial age in this ad design. No one involved can be younger than…I’ll say 38. You have to have grown up either in the 70s or in an era of cable reruns for this to become a dorm-room staple. A lower-limit boundary has been set!

Caddyshack opens with a gopher puppet dancing along to Kenny Loggins. It’s giving Country Bear Jamboree and I’m not mad at it. It was my understanding before seeing the film that this gopher was the main antagonist of the story, but now that I have seen it I realize that it is in fact the main protagonist of the story. It is gopher versus violent, heartless commercial developers. Those tunnels are his home, they are all he has, and he is under constant attack. His main tormentor is a cognitively-deficient man in a bucket hat, but that man is merely a pawn of the uncaring capitalist machine, sent out into the field to wage the rich man’s war. Beyond this gripping battle there is also one subplot where said rich men gamble on a golf game and another one where a young man working as a caddy gets everything he ever dreamed of despite not being especially smart or hard-working or nice or good at making life choices.

This is probably where I should do my standard disclaimer, which is: I know there are a lot of people who love this movie and it’s totally fine if you love this movie. What’s up, most IMDb commenters! One of my favorite movies is also directed by Harold Ramis and features Bill Murray and a rodent—believe me, I get it. Comedy, more than most genres, lives and dies by where you’re at in life when you first experience it. There are many comedies—some of them made by many of these exact same people—that I fell in love with when I was about 10-12 years old and therefore still find funny, but would probably be significantly less enamored with if I encountered them for the first time today. Unfortunately for Caddyshack, it is in fact today, currently.

After the gopher puppet does his little dance and then goes away, I am sad. Now we are in a house where there appear to be somewhere on the order of two dozen children of various ages. I eventually realized that this is meant to be a humorously large family—based on co-writer Brian Doyle-Murray’s experience growing up with eight siblings—but I was genuinely confused as to what was going on, if it was some sort of boarding house or orphanage or whatnot. Already this movie and I are not on the same wavelength. Anyway, Fred from Roseanne is there and his name is Danny and he is very young and has cute floppy hair. He wants to go to college but is lacking familial support, due to his parents having an absolutely untenable number of children.

The fancy country club where he caddies has a general air of hijinkery. A very trim Brian Doyle-Murray is the standard grumpy comedy boss. There is one terrible rich man who is a judge and a different terrible rich man who is Rodney Dangerfield. The movie, which indulges in many significant flights of fancy, nevertheless maintains an astounding cinéma vérité-style commitment to showing how much everyone is sweating through their shirts at all times. The terrible judge man has a niece who is thin and blonde, which is a problem for every man within several zip codes. I don’t recommend reading any trivia about how that actress was treated during filming unless you want to be pretty bummed out. The man she is interested in is played by Chevy Chase, who is very good at golf and strangely philosophical. There is also a girl who works at the club and hooks up with Danny and is Irish for absolutely no given reason. (The reason is that most of the exposition and plot was cut out of the movie in favor of gopher.) Bill Murray is hunting said gopher and providing a stream of pure, uncut Murrayness. Almost all of the people in this film are white and the fact that large crowds of them are wearing red hats a lot of the time probably gave off a different vibe in 1980.

Danny is trying to get a golf-based scholarship from the judge so that he can be successful. The judge and Rodney Dangerfield are feuding. For reasons I have already forgotten this ends up destroying several boats and leads to a golf game with a very high wager that will somehow benefit Danny. Rodney Dangerfield wears every color visible to the human eye several times each in different combinations. He also calls the gopher a kangaroo, which made me laugh. Eventually Danny ends up with a lot of money and an Irish girl who isn’t mad at him even though he also slept with the thin blonde niece and has not demonstrated any particularly appealing characteristics beyond his floppy hair.

There were a lot of things I liked. I thought the Chevy Chase content of the film was dosed correctly for maximum humor and minimum exhaustion. Ted Knight’s commitment to being fully unhinged is frankly an inspiration. I suffer from a brightly-colored film deficiency that causes me to constantly crave them, and this one provides in spades. But it’s emblematic of an era in comedy where everyone was clearly doing a lot of cocaine and the joke is often just “a woman has breasts” or “someone took a golf ball to the groin,” and the main takeaway is that if you want to get ahead in life you should really consider being an unexceptional white man.

That said, it ends with the gopher once again dancing, triumphant. And I am happy.

The Regal Ad

The outfit: It’s a bucket hat. It works. A

The line: Although I didn’t immediately know it offhand, this does seem to be a pretty famous line, coming at the end of an entirely improvised Bill Murray speech about the Dalai Lama stiffing him on monetary compensation but assuring him that he will receive “total consciousness” on his death bed. It’s a funny bit, and probably not the only time in this project that we will be encountering a line that was ad libbed. A-

The context: This might be a controversial stance amongst my fellow ad-non-enjoyers, but I actually think this little exchange—she holds up her Regal Unlimited barcode, the thing she has going for her, and concessions guy joins in to complete the line—is the most successful example of what they were trying to achieve here. It’s a thing that someone might actually quote while demonstrating something that is of value to them, and the act of him recognizing the line and saying it along with her in character is the way insufferable movie nerds actually operate in the world. It captures the spirit of relating to the people and world around you through bits of pop culture, something I and my mental bank of 25,000 Simpsons quotes wouldn’t know anything about. A+

Baby Ruth Candy Bars from Food Network

At one point, a girl tosses an unwrapped chocolate bar into the club pool and havoc ensues due to the fecal aesthetic of the candy. Not to brag, but not only did my homemade bars taste incredible, I actually think they look even more like poop than the movie prop. Because that’s what we do here. We excel.

Up next: “I miss your musk.”