Jeremy’s Tophunder №58: Old School

6 min readMay 22, 2020

When I was a freshman in college, my roommate and I hung a grand total of two posters in our room. The first was of John Belushi in Animal House, wearing his iconic “College” sweater. The second was Will Ferrell in Old School, standing on the front porch of the frat house, holding a blow up doll. The message was clear. We are in college, and we’re not here to take it too seriously.

Old School has a rather special place in my heart — it’s the movie that I associate most with the idea of college, despite the fact that the three main characters in in their mid-30s. It’s a “frat” movie, but I wasn’t a fraternity-type guy in college. I went to frat parties a few times as a freshman and early sophomore year, because I had a few friends that were brothers, but that’s about it. It still reminds me of college, though, probably mostly because I watched Old School somewhere between 12 and 371 times over the course of four years with various roommates. On more than one occasion, I have typed the words “how to start a fraternity” into a search engine. It turns out it’s simultaneously way easier and also way harder than you’d imagine.

On early drafts of my list, Old School was the highest-ranked comedy by a decent margin, and even flirted with the Top 10 a few times. It might be my favorite Will Ferrell performance (but Ferrell is my favorite comedic actor and it’s tough competition). It’s almost definitely my favorite Vince Vaughn performance, and it’s my favorite Luke Wilson performance basically by default (he doesn’t have the most impressive resume). It’s also stocked to the brim with great cameos, including Sean William Scott, Matt Walsh, Artie Lange, Rob Corddry, Bryan Callen, Terry O’Quinn, and Andy Dick. Perrey Reeves, Leah Remini, Ellen Pompeo, and Elisha Cuthbert are all great as well, and obviously, it also features Snoop Dogg and James Carville as themselves.

My two favorite supporting roles, though, come from Craig Kilborn and Jeremy Piven. There’s something that I really, really enjoy about those two guys playing unlikable characters, considering both Kilborn and Piven are so unlikable in real life. I suppose Kilborn is mostly just undeservedly full of himself (which is annoying but ultimately not that important), but Piven, seemingly by all accounts, is a pain in the ass to work with and has been accused multiple times of sexual harassment. It’s just so easy to hate both of them, and Old School gives you a perfect excuse.

My favorite scene in the movie is actually the inconsequential wedding between Will Ferrell and Perrey Reeves, mostly for the performance of The Dan Band. They appear in most Todd Phillips movies, but they made their film debut here, with a wonderful rendition of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

It’s one of my favorite covers of all time, mostly because if you listen to it out of context, it’s unclear if it’s supposed to be a joke or not. One of my biggest laughs in the movie is when the first F-bomb in the song comes, and Ferrell and Reeves both give each other a perplexed look.

On multiple occasions, a friend and I have performed a karaoke version of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” but obviously, we’ve done it as The Dan Band would do it. The best it’s ever gone was when a group of older patrons (probably in their 50s or 60s) got excited when they heard the opening piano melody, thinking that they were going to hear an impassioned rendition of a song that they clearly enjoy, only to be supremely disappointed to discover that I’m a truly dreadful singer, and then become progressively angrier and angrier as we drop somewhere between 12–14 various usages of “fuck” into a four-minute song that normally includes zero. They were -not- happy by the end of our performance. But, honestly, we crushed it.

Honestly, Old School kind of gets lost in the long list of tremendous Will Ferrell performances. It’s certainly far from his most iconic role, which would probably go to Anchorman or Elf, and I would hazard a guess that most people would name movies like Talladega Nights or Step Brothers before they named Old School if they were asked to rattle off a list of Will Ferrell movies from memory. And that’s disappointing, because Ferrell is by far the funniest character in the movie. I know this is going pretty far down the rabbit hole, but if there was a line-reading Hall of Fame, a first-ballot inductee would be Ferrell kind-of-but-kind-of-not slurring “I love you, dad!” as Luke Wilson gives a speech at his wedding.

(As an aside — the out-and-out funniest part of the movie, at least for me, is Wilson’s speech that immediately follows Ferrell’s “I love you dad!” Wilson starting with “True love is hard to find. Sometimes you think you have true love and then you catch the early flight home from San Diego and a couple of nude people jump out of your bathroom blindfolded like a goddamn magic show, ready to double-team your girlfriend…” before being cut off always elicits a legitimate laughing fit out of me.)

Other top-tier Ferrell moments include his debate against James Carville, his gymnastics routine (with the music from Chariots of Fire, no less), and the scene where Perrey Reeves says she wants a divorce. He’s hysterical in literally every scene, including the ones that have become kind of played out over the last two decades (like the tranquilizer scene or the streaking scene).

So if Old School started these drafts close to the Top 10, why did it fall so far down on the final list? Well, for starters, it seemed like most comedies fell reasonably far from where they started in the first draft. But more specifically, some parts of Old School just don’t hold up that well. The movie just got kind of old. Maybe I’ve seen it 45 too many times, but a number of scenes that I used to love just don’t strike my funny bone quite the same way anymore. Beyond that, Luke Wilson’s character hooking up with a high-school aged girl doesn’t seem nearly as amusing as it did when I was in high school.

But it’s still an incredibly funny movie, and a movie that reminds me of a simpler, more irresponsible time in my life, and for that, I’ll always love it.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

12. The Prestige

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall