My Favorite Summer Movie

Over at AintitCool.Com, they're running a blog thread about various writers' favorite summer movies. I'm not talking about this summer's best movies. I'm talking about the one movie in your life that comes to mind when you think "summer." For many people it has been Jaws, for others, it has been one of the Star Wars movies. Jaws is indeed a great "summer movie," and it would be my second choice. But my no. 1 choice for my most cherished summer movie experience harkens back to 1978, and National Lampoon's Animal House.

I chose Animal House because I saw it twice in the late summer of 1978, and the second viewing was even better than the first, which is pretty rare. Initially, I saw it with my cousin in mid-August, not long before I went back to Penn State for my junior year. (My cousin was the guy with whom I had seen the first Star Wars only the year before.) I remember we laughed -- a lot. The theater was not far from St. Vincent College, which the Pittsburgh Steelers used as a training camp site (and still do), and I'm pretty sure the last couple rows of the theater were filled with Steelers players laughing their heads off along with the rest of us.

But the second viewing is what cinched my choice for me. Less than two weeks later, I was back on campus, and about 15 to 20 of us, male and female alike, banded together after lunch one afternoon during orientation week and walked downtown to the local two-screener to catch a matinee of Animal House. The place was jammed with raucous, screaming college students. I can't remember the last time, before or since, when a theater crowd elevated my enjoyment of a film to such heights. It really felt like a shared experience; we were a community, claiming this movie for ourselves. Hell, the movie was about college students! WE WERE COLLEGE STUDENTS!!! Well, most of us weren't as depraved and disgusting in our behavior as John Belushi, but we tried. That year, we tried a lot. (Belushi -- now there's a comic actor I really miss.)

The matinee that afternoon touched off what turned out to be my favorite year of the four I spent at Penn State. There was the dance marathon (where my partner and I placed second), our Sugar Bowl bout with Alabama, my interview with the singers following a Hall and Oates concert, and my first steps into my journalism major. It was a memorable year, and it began with my all-time favorite summer movie experience.

What's yours?