LOS ANGELES – On a Saturday evening in Los Angeles, I found myself watching acclaimed actor Elizabeth Banks sing Tom Petty songs along with her fellow actors while writer/director David Wain played the drums. This incredible, bizarre performance celebrated the 25th anniversary of the raunchy, summer camp cult classic “Wet Hot American Summer.” But do you remember that it’s actually a space movie?
This movie — the debut feature film from co-creators David Wain and Michael Showalter — follows the events of “Camp Firewood,” a sleepaway summer camp set in the summer of 1981. It has a cast chock-full of now-A-list actors, including Banks, Bradley Cooper, Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler and so many more. Looking back, it’s almost baffling how star-studded the cast really is.
Campy in every sense of the word, the movie manages to balance vulgar jokes with some serious heart. And while the off-color comedy was infamously a box office bomb, this heart has cemented its status as a beloved cult classic, and watching it has become as time-honored a tradition as summer camp itself.
I am personally biased toward this film, as my teenage summers were spent as a camp counselor and the movie hits that perfect, nostalgic sweet spot. But when I sat down to watch the film again on Aug. 8 at an outdoor anniversary screening, I realized it had been many years since I’d actually seen it.
And while I remembered the warm, summer camp vibes, somehow I had completely forgotten something: The movie hinges on the plot that a piece of Skylab (yes, that Skylab) is falling to Earth, and a nearby, vacationing astrophysicist teams up with the nerdy kids at camp to build a homegrown device to try and stop it.
The strangest part? In 1979, Skylab did fall back to Earth, and a couple of pieces actually survived the trip (just not at Camp Firewood).
At its core, this beloved camp movie that I used to watch after camp with my fellow counselors (at our own camp, Summer Parks) is … science fiction. It might seem like a b-plot, but if you find yourself rewatching the film, you might be surprised at how much of a space movie it really is.
The first inklings of this emerge when camp director Beth (Janeane Garofalo) meets astrophysicist Professor Henry Newman (David Hyde Pierce), who is vacationing in a cabin near the camp. She asks if he might come to camp and teach some of the kids about space. And while he at first declines, he soon decides to show up at camp to spend time with some of the kids and chat about outer space.
As other camp hijinks are happening, we occasionally cut back to this group of “indoor kids” in the woods, pretending rocks are planets, having a great time. But at some point, it’s revealed that the camp is in grave danger. Not only is a piece of Skylab, the first U.S. space station, falling, but it’s headed right for camp! In fact, it’s headed right for the talent show that’s taking place on the last night of camp (of course).
Henry and his merry band of science-obsessed campers are quick to act, and they work together to cobble together a makeshift Skylab tracking device. But to transform the device so it can divert Skylab, they need to generate random numbers between one and 20. Thank goodness one of the campers just so happens to be carrying a D20 die.
In the end, Skylab does crash-land into camp, but it narrowly misses the talent show, and no one gets hurt. Did the device work? Did another camper demonstrating their wind-generating superpowers at the talent show secretly help out? Or was their Skylab tracking wrong all along?
After camp is finally over for the summer, we get to see the aftermath as campers walk out to their rides home past a giant hunk of the Skylab space station jutting out of the grass.
It’s a fun easter egg to see Skylab crashing to Earth in a campy summer camp flick, and during a panel ahead of the screening, the cast and crew revealed that it was a lot of fun for them, too.
According to the panelists, which included Wain, Banks, Joe Lo Truglio (who plays Neil in the film), and Marguerite Moreau (who plays Katie), everyone on the set was taking turns getting their picture taken with Skylab. This is evident in the image above, snapped and shared with us by actor Zak Orth, who plays J.J.
While there were no reported injuries or property damage from the debris, roughly 26 tons of material fell to Earth, some of it surviving the trip and landing in Western Australia.
So in an alternate version of history where Camp Firewood is located in a remote area of Australia, this plot could have been more than science fiction.
Want to relive the sci-fi summer camp glory? To celebrate its 25th anniversary, Wet Hot American Summer is returning to select theaters from Aug. 14-21. If you miss that, you can also buy or rent it on Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV.
