That year, a group of existing investors that included Indiana businessmen Dan Laikin and Tim Durham reached an agreement with Jimirro to buy his J2 shares and take a majority interest in the company. SEC filings show that J2 lost $1.3 million in fiscal 1999 before turning a profit of $826,000 in 2000 and then losing more than $3 million in 2001. Yet despite that craven approach, trademark-based revenue wasn’t always enough to keep it in the black.
J2 even explored launching a comedy-themed National Lampoon Café as well as a comedy cruise called the Laugh Boat.
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The company tried to capitalize on whatever appeal National Lampoon still held by slapping the name on TV specials, merchandising, and pretty much anything else it could find. Jackson!), and 1995’s National Lampoon’s Senior Trip (Jeremy Renner’s big-screen debut!).īut J2 didn’t stop with movies. In the early going, that tactic yielded forgettable but relatively inoffensive fare such as 1993’s Lethal Weapon spoof, Loaded Weapon 1 (starring Emilio Estevez and Samuel L. J2, headed by former Walt Disney and CBS executive James Jimirro, was attempting to boost revenue by licensing out the National Lampoon likeness for use on content produced outside the company.
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National Lampoon hadn’t been genuinely associated with a hit movie since 1989’s National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and was barely involved in some of the movies bearing its brand in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the brand’s film efforts were similarly flagging. The magazine lost money for years, with J2 only putting out a handful of issues per year before shuttering the title for good after 1998. At the time, National Lampoon was surviving on little more than the royalty checks from Animal House and the Vacation franchise. A company named J2 Communications had bought National Lampoon in 1990 from an ownership group that included actor Tim Matheson, who played Otter in Animal House. But that was far from the only issue.īy that point, National Lampoon’s increasingly spotty track record left it with little leverage when it came to title billing. According to current National Lampoon president Alan Donnes, the studio’s decision followed a falling out among that film’s producers, who included former National Lampoon editor Matty Simmons. Warner Bros., which distributed the original three Vacation films, elected to remote the National Lampoon branding from Vegas Vacation. But by the time a fourth Vacation movie, 1997’s Vegas Vacation, had begun development, the bloom was off the rose. The jump to movies came in 1978 with the massively successful Animal House, and continued through the 1980s largely on the strength of the three Vacation movies: the original (1983), European Vacation (1985), and Christmas Vacation (1989). O’Rourke and Michael O’Donoghue when National Lampoon later expanded to radio and stage shows, it further established itself with contributions from brilliant performers such Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, John Belushi, and Gilda Radner.
The brand boasted a succession of hilarious, subversive writers such as P.J. National Lampoon first appeared in 1970 as a print publication, the offshoot of a revered Harvard University comedy magazine. Even so, despite having absolutely nothing to do with Vacation, the movie is the most high-profile moment in more than a decade for National Lampoon, a once-revered brand that has been steadily cheapened into near obsolescence. The company that gave birth to the Vacation franchise had no creative input in its reboot. Though it involves intellectual property from the original, the movie was produced independent of any National Lampoon involvement. What’s conspicuously missing, however, is the “National Lampoon” tag. The reboot, if you want to call it that, is rife with references to its predecessor: Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo appear, “Holiday Road” soundtracks the Griswold family’s latest adventure, and Wally World is once again the destination. One movie they did not make is Vacation, the new movie inspired by 1983’s National Lampoon’s Vacation. National Lampoon continued to make National Lampoon movies, a distinction that had long ceased to be favorable. That scuttled any potential course change and encouraged the new owners to double down on sophomoric humor for sex-starved frat boys, leading to a string of execrable movies like National Lampoon’s Barely Legal, National Lampoon Presents Cattle Call (which is about porn, not livestock), and the abhorrent, Ryan Reynolds–less Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj. Then Van Wilder was an unexpected cult success, earning nearly $40 million worldwide.