I guess you had to be there

I never really did the summer camp thing when I was a kid, and to be honest, I've sometimes wondered how much it was a Boomer thing that's now a product of a bygone era. I couldn't help but think about that as I was watching the movie Meatballs.

Bill Murray gets his first starring role as Tripper, a head counselor at Camp North Star, a summer camp on a lake the location of which I don't think is ever really mentioned, although there were enough visual clues to make me wonder whether the movie was filmed in Canada. (It was, if you're wondering.) Tripper worked the camp the previous summer, and you get the impression that many of the counselors there for this summer did as well, as some of them try to rekindle old relationships. That's just one of many tropes that shows up in the movie.

Another running joke that appears throughout the movie involves Melnick, the owner of the camp. He's apparently a heavy sleeper to the point that the counselors are able to move him in his bed while he's still asleep and put the bed in all sorts of humorously dangerous places.

Then there's Rudy (Chris Makepeace), one of the youths at the camp. He's a bit of a loner and misfit, since his mom died and his dad is much too busy to look after him. Now, if Rudy were an adult they could have had the courage to do what Tea and Sympathy didn't and make his character turn out to be gay, but Meatballs isn't that sort of movie. Instead, Tripper takes Rudy under his wing in a completely clean way, playing blackjack and going out for morning runs with the kid, something that's going to come back for the climax.

That climax involves Camp Mohawk, located on the other side of the lake. Mohawk is the camp for the wealthy kids who aren't misfits, and one that's perceived to be "better" than North Star in so many ways. One such was is the annual "camp Olympics" in which the two camps compete against each other in a whole bunch of sports. Mohawk has won year after year, but North Star finally figures out a way to get around Mohawk's cheating.

As I said at the beginning, I never did this sort of camping; my parents weren't wealthy enough to send us kids to summer camps. We did a couple of day camps when my parents were trying to get us involved in Scouting (which I didn't care for one bit), but that's about it. The jokes in Meatballs seem like they're recycled from every other summer-camp movie and TV show I've ever seen. Some people may like such jokes, and those who actually went to summer camps may have some nostalgic remembrance of such stuff. But it didn't really move me very much.

This isn't to say that Meatballs is a bad movie; it obviously didn't hurt Bill Murray's career one bit. But to me it felt as if there was nothing original here, and the sort of movie that didn't deserve the reputation it seems to have among a certain set.