It’s rare when a movie prods and reshapes the culture, but in 1978, the slovenly frat boy hijinks of National Lampoon’s Animal House did just that. Food fights, peekaboo nudity, ”boogie till you puke” toga parties: overnight, the movie put a generation in touch with its yearning for salacious slob liberation. It was the real kickoff, three years before MTV, of Spring Break as a state of mind.
It was also the launch-pad, of course, for a thousand crudely raunchy imitators — the gross-out exploitation comedies of the 80s, like Gorp and Private School and the box office smash Porky’s (which was essentially Animal House with less wit, more breasts and 58% more rednecks). Most of these pictures were junk, yet they had one thing going for them: an internal Enemy. They helped set the tone for a world in which piggy excess was cool and responsibility and good taste were to be attacked and destroyed.
Back then, no one could have guessed that the grade-Z Animal House clones would one day be remembered as hip, dumb touchstones and fondly recycled in movies like American Pie and the clever, shallow, genially vulgar Road Trip. The new models, if anything, are superior to the old–smartly paced studio machines stocked with gifted young actors who love to clown. They also let women in on the action, allowing them to be sharp-tongued characters and not just hot-bod pinups with movable parts.
What these movies don’t have–can’t have–is the genuine, roguish kick that comes from slaying an Enemy. Spring Break anarchy, after all, is no longer a rowdy, rock & roll stance, it’s the status quo, and good taste is but a distant memory. Road Trip, which, like Animal House, was produced by Ivan Reitman, celebrates the triumph of hedonistic righteousness in a world where it already rules. Continue reading MasterChugs Theater: ‘Road Trip’
Muntadher al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush and spurred some of the greatest animated GIFs in Internet history, 
It seems simple, really: we trash the environment, we trash the very habitat that our enemies call home. When our beastly foes have nowhere to hide, we can kill them off more easily. That’s just how total war works. We all know that is General William T. Sherman were alive today, he would to the same thing.