Yes, it’s Spring Break, folks! From what I’ve been told over the years, well over a couple of dozen people between the ages of 33 and 45 have fond memories of this movie.
It wasn’t a huge blockbuster by today’s standards, but considering the production budget was, as I recall, 1.6 million, and was distributed by Columbia Pictures, it did REALLY well, and made some nice people a bunch of money.
It was rated R, but compared to pretty much anything since, it’s surprisingly tame.
For many impressionable youths it was their first exposure to Wet T-shirt contests, drunken college revelry and peeing on alligators, and gave them something to look forward to after graduating High-School.
Personally, since I went to high school in the dark days before Spring Break, I felt no compunction whatsoever to continue the drudgery of institutional book-learnin’. Had I only known what I really had to look forward to (i.e. drunken revelry and the promise of getting laid by hot chicks in bikinis), I might not have ever become an actor.
Wow. And if I hadn’t become an actor, I wouldn’t have have starred in this movie, and maybe it would have starred Steve Guttenberg instead, and tanked at the box office, and millions of horny geek teenagers would have never seen it, and eschued college entirely and some of them never have invented the internets, and our whole society as we know it might have collapsed and you wouldn’t be reading this right now.
It’s like what Clarence tells George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life”:
Clarence: “Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”
Or like that Ashton Kushner movie I never saw.
Spring Break has yet to come out on DVD, but I’ll happily forward any requests and comments to Columbia video and Congress to move that along. In the meantime you can still buy VHS copies on eBay for a couple of bucks.