The "Porky's" Trilogy

Oh, these things bring back some fond memories.

I saw the first one when I was in the second grade in the fall of 1983. It was premiering on HBO, and I had absolutely no idea what this was, especially not by the title. It didn't sound like it was going to be a Looney Tunes cartoon!

Man...I don't think I laughed as hard as I did in my life as I watched this. I had seen some funny stuff before, but this one seemed to have topped everything, and gone way beyond it. One scene seemed to be superseded by the next one in terms of hilarity: Pee-Wee's "morning wood", the guys all running out of the house stark naked, Tommy running around the schoolyard with the inflated super-size condom, Meat passing out into a bowl of chili, Coach Brackett and Miss Honeywell getting it on in the locker room (while the assistant coach is crying his eyes out laughing in the gym), and--finally--the "tallywhacker" conversation in Mr. Carter's office. I don't know who was laughing harder...them or me!

When we heard there was a second one that had come out, Dad rented the videotape of it as soon as it came out. Boy, were we excited...and the momentum of excitement slowly melted as it went on. Sure, there was some good stuff in it, but very sporadically, and nothing like the first one. The funniest scene for us was the double-sided prank at the graveyard, where poor ol' Pee-Wee was running down the road naked again, but Steve was drunker than hell and going "boogie-boogie-boogie!" on the sheriff's car!

The scene with Wendy and Commissioner Gebhardt was just plain over-the-top and seemed like a totally different movie altogether. I think half the film's budget went into that scene, by the looks of it. And it wasn't really that funny, either, although we were treated to the immortal line "Your ass sucks canal water, buddy!".

And, of course, everyone thought it weird that the man of whom the movie was named after was not in it. I've heard that Porky was supposed to have been revealed as the Grand Dragon of the KKK, but balked at the idea of running around naked with the other Klansmen, and that was the end of his involvement.

As soon as we heard that there was a third one, the whole lot of us went to the AMC8 Theatre to see it on the big screen. It was a full house when we got there, and the only seats left were right up in the front row, looking up at the screen at a not-so-great angle.

We liked the one a little better, although some of the cast was missing, the school looked different, and everyone looked a little too old to convincingly be playing high-school students. The biggest laugh we got was when the guys go past a girl bending over underneath the hood of a stalled car, Meat gets out to take a look, and when she turns around, the other guys peel out, leaving Meat there with her.

It was great to see Porky in the movie with the gang, and it was great fun to see his steamboat casino get wrecked under the bridge at the end. But it was also a little sad that this was the final go-round with the Angel Beach gang, and that there weren't going to be any further adventures with them. But what a great time we'd had!

Years later, while still in school, a friend was talking about these, saying that they were funny then, but not so much now. He noted that for a bunch of movies about guys trying to score, "you saw more naked guys running around than naked girls!". That summed it up perfectly.