Meatballs - Special Edition | DVD | Widescreen

    Set at a low-end summer camp and aimed squarely at a teen audience, Meatballs is a light screwball comedy that turned its low-budget Canadian roots into a very profitable box-office run. Camp opens with Tripper and Morty preparing the misfit counselors-in-training - Spaz, Fink, Crockett, A.L., Candace, Wendy, and Wheels among them - for the arrival of their hyperactive little charges. Romance, fun, and comic mayhem lead up to an annual Olympiad in which Camp Northstar battles the wealthier and athletically superior residents of Camp Mohawk. The challenging events include cup stacking, potato-sack racing, a hot dog eating contest, and more.

    Decades before he was winning accolades for his work in Lost in Translation and Rushmore, Bill Murray was making moviegoers snicker with his breakthrough comedy Meatballs. This film--which was released theatrically in 1979--stars a 29-year-old Murray as a horny camp counselor named Tripper Harrison, who is just barely more mature than the kids he's looking after. Tripper seems like a screw up because he is, but the audience sees soon enough that he has that proverbial heart of gold, which is offset by an acerbic tongue. Looking over one of the unhappy children in his charge, Tripper says, "You must be the short, depressed kid we ordered." Camp North Star isn't the type of destination kids dream about during the school year. As envisioned by director Ivan Reitman (who would again collaborate with Murray in Ghostbusters), it's a place where kids do their time until their parents let them return home. But in his own way, Tripper makes it a fun place for the kids to learn about the opposite sex and get a feeling for competition. Unlike Little Darlings, the coming-of-age camping film starring Kristy McNichol and Tatum O'Neal that was released a year later, there really isn't a strong moral to this film. But there is a sense that thanks to Tripper's unorthodox madness, he makes Camp North Star a place that kids want to return to the following year. While not as self-assured as he would be in a smaller role in 1980's Caddyshack, Murray is highly likeable here as an overgrown doof.