Wet Hot American Summer: Everything You Didn’t Know

Your two camp counselors of crap that really doesn't matter are back to cover this cult comedy classic and say farewell to summer. You’ll hear how director David Wain and Michael Showalter scraped the film together from camp memories, half-baked funding promises, and an indie script so dark at one point it featured a silencer and two bullets to the brain. Shot on a shoestring at a real Pennsylvania camp, the production was less summer idyll and more soggy boot camp: freezing rain, muddy cabins, and craft services that amounted to pizza bagels every day until the cast staged a mutiny.

And because Wet Hot American Summer is as much pop culture oddity as it is comedy, they'll tour its stranger corners: Bradley Cooper skipping his graduation to shoot, Elizabeth Banks shivering through bikini scenes in 40-degree weather, Alex's beloved Christopher Meloni method-acting his way into a “cuddly Rambo” character, and a post-production fart-only DVD commentary track that may be the film’s most enduring legacy. From box office disaster to cult-comedy ur-text, this is the story of how a little camp movie with no budget and no buzz wound up shaping the absurdist humor of a generation.

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