National Lampoon's Animal House is a 1978 American comedy film directed by John Landis and written by Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney and Chris Miller.

Of the younger lead actors, only the 28-year-old Belushi was an established star, but even he had not yet appeared in a film, having gained fame as an original cast member of Saturday Night Live, which was in its third season in the autumn of 1977.

Following its initial release on July 28, 1978, Animal House received generally mixed reviews from critics, but Time and Roger Ebert proclaimed it one of the year's best.

Various incidents increase the already deep animosity between Delta, Omega, and Wormer, including the accidental death of Neidermeyer's horse during a retaliatory prank following the bullying of ROTC member Flounder by Niedermeyer.

Later, Bluto and D-Day are directed to steal the answer key to an upcoming midterm exam from the trash, unaware that the Omegas have switched it for a fake.

All of the Deltas fail the exam, and their grade-point averages drop so low that Wormer tells them he needs only one more incident to revoke their charter and have them permanently expelled from campus.

At the market, Pinto meets a pretty young cashier named Clorette and invites her to the party, while Otter flirts with an older woman, who turns out to be Dean Wormer's alcoholic wife, Marion.

Due to the Deltas' dismal midterm grades, Wormer expels them all from Faber and gleefully tells them he has notified their local draft boards that they are now all eligible for military service.

Marmalard and Neidermeyer suffer unfortunate events later in life, while most of the Deltas become successful professionals, with Bluto eventually being elected a United States Senator.

[12] Filmmaker Ivan Reitman had just finished producing David Cronenberg's first film, Shivers, and called the magazine's publisher Matty Simmons about making movies under the Lampoon banner.

[13] Reitman had put together The National Lampoon Show in New York City featuring several future Saturday Night Live cast members, including John Belushi.

[12] The famous scene of Bruce McGill as D-Day riding a motorcycle up the stairs of the fraternity house was inspired by Belushi's antics while a student at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater.

[14] Kenney and Ramis started working on a new film treatment together, positing Charles Manson in a high school, calling it Laser Orgy Girls.

[13] The film's producers approached Richard Lester and Bob Rafelson before hiring John Landis, who got the director job based on his work on Kentucky Fried Movie.

After he consulted with other senior administrative colleagues who advised him to turn it down due to the lack of artistic merit, the college campus scenes set at Berkeley were shot at USC in Los Angeles.

After consulting with student government leaders and officers of the Pan Hellenic Council, the Director of University Relations advised the president that the script, although raunchy and often tasteless, was a very funny spoof of college life.

The concluding parade scene was filmed on Main Street in downtown Cottage Grove, about twenty miles (32 km) south of Eugene via Interstate 5.

Belushi and his wife Judy rented a house in south Eugene to keep him away from alcohol and drugs;[13][26] she remained in Oregon while he commuted to New York City for Saturday Night Live.

More seriously, the segment alarmed Tanen and other studio executives, who perceived it as racist and warned that "'black people in America are going to rip the seats out of theaters if you leave that scene in the movie.'"

He adapted the "Faber College Theme" from the Academic Festival Overture by Brahms, and he said that the film opened yet another door in his diverse career: scoring comedies.

[48] In his review for Time, Frank Rich wrote, "At its best it perfectly expresses the fears and loathings of kids who came of age in the late '60s; at its worst Animal House revels in abject silliness.

[37] Universal Pictures spent about $4.5 million ($21,021,429 in today's money) promoting the film at selected college campuses and helped students organize their own toga parties.

[63] The film inspired a short-lived half-hour ABC television sitcom, Delta House, in which Vernon reprised his role as the long-suffering, malevolent Dean Wormer.

Later, Chris Miller and John Weidman, another Lampoon writer, created a treatment for this screenplay, but Universal rejected it because the sequel to American Graffiti, which contained some hippie-1967 sequences, had not done well.

[68] A second attempt at a sequel was made in 1982 with producer Matty Simmons co-authoring a script that saw some of the Deltas returning to Faber College five years after the events of the film.

Kenny, with production notes, theatrical trailer, and new interviews with director Landis, writers Harold Ramis and Chris Miller, composer Elmer Bernstein, and stars Tim Matheson, Karen Allen, Stephen Furst, John Vernon, Verna Bloom, Bruce McGill, James Widdoes, Peter Riegert, Mark Metcalf and Kevin Bacon.

One major change shown in this mockumentary from the epilogue of the original film is that Bluto went on from his career in the U.S. Senate to become the President of the United States, with a voiceover on a shot of the north portico of the White House, since by then Belushi had died.

Universal Animated Anecdotes", a subtitle trivia track, the making of a documentary from the Collector's Edition, MxPx "Shout" music video, a theatrical trailer, production notes, and cast and filmmakers biographies.

[78] On the left-wing and counterculture side, the film included references to topical political matters like President Harry S. Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, and the civil rights movement.

[21] At the start of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), also directed by John Landis, a scene set in Vietnam includes a soldier saying "I told you guys, we shouldn't have shot Lieutenant Neidermeyer."