Remember in 2001 when Wet Hot American Summer came out to scathing reviews and tanked at the box office? Probably not, because everybody started discovering and loving this movie several years later, as the writers and cast discuss at the premiere of the Netflix prequel series.
Entertainment Weekly has a lot of charming anecdotes about when David Hyde Pierce, Bradley Cooper, Paul Rudd and everyone else realized that their summer camp movie had become a cult classic. My favorite comes from co-creator David Wain:
I would hear about college campuses doing a screening or a midnight show in a city like Portland or Austin. Then I’d hear stories of people going on a date or something, and the people they were on a date with would say, “Did you like Wet Hot American Summer?” and that would be a litmus test for how well the date was going to go. I could tell from that that it was more than just a movie people liked; it represented something to them.
Not a bad way to weed the good from the bad dates. Hopefully the Netflix series, which premieres July 31, will be just as good of a litmus test.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)
