Toshiro Mifune is in it! I know Spielberg loves Kurosawa, Seven Samurai, etc. Deep down inside, he has to be embarrassed he got Mifune to do a movie and he made 1941.
Thanks for reinforcing one of my points.
Apologies in advance for cheating a little, but I believe I've seen both 1941 and Animal House enough to compare them from memory. As always with my rants, I will admit where/when I'm off base...
1941 vs. Animal House
Two young directors trending upward. One very mainstream, one more underground. One has multiple blockbusters under his belt, one has a future cult hit. The 'lesser' of the two released an instant classic comedy movie in 1978. A year later, the 'better' of the two releases a comedy with a cast of past, present and future stars, including arguably the hottest property in Hollywood at that moment, a comedy written by two young writers who will go on to create not only one of the most iconic franchises of the 80's but also one of the most iconic movies of the Baby Boomer Generation that won an Oscar for its lead actor. What could go wrong?
Part 1: Director: Steven Spielberg vs. John Landis
Prior to their respective movies, Spielberg had 3 theatrical releases under his belt (including 2 blockbusters), while Landis had 2 (no blockbusters but one was the cult hit Kentucky Fried Movie). While Spielberg was the higher profile of the two, Landis was in his element with comedy, while Spielberg only had 'comedy' lightly sprinkled into his films to this point and a full-on comedy movie was going to be a stretch, which I think this is the first sign that 1941 was going to be 'problematic'.
Part II: Script/story: History vs Experience
Right off the bat, 1941 was ill-fated because of how the story/script came into existence. Back to the Future masterminds Robert Zemekis and Bob Gale basically mashed together several actual events that unfolded in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, as well as the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943; the sub-plot of an anti-aircraft gun being placed in a private homeowner's yard is also factual but occurred on the east coast instead of the west coast setting of the film. Gale and Zemekis pitched the concept to John Milius (for those unfamiliar with Milius, his body of work ranges from Patton to Conan the Barbarian and for a long time, he was a go-to ghost writer, with a flair for war/warlike stories/dialog, and was the Coen Brothers inspiration for the character of Walter in The Big Lebowski. Basically he is/was the Ernest Hemmingway of his generation and a personal favorite). When Spielberg became attached to the project, the idea of a drama was scrapped and it became a comedy, albeit a risky one since joking about Pearl Harbor takes Mel Brooks-level comedic chops. No doubt that time proved Zemekis and Gale to be adept with comedy, but this film has no 'Springtime for Hitler' moment, just broad negative stereotypes that would get any director cancelled today.
Animal House, on the other hand, came from recent memories of college hi-jinks (much more fertile ground for comedy than Pearl Harbor) from writers Harold Ramis, Doug Kenney and Chris Miller. Kenney co-founded National Lampoon Magazine and Miller was a contributor to the magazine. In other words, three comedic geniuses combined events they lived through to create the script, giving it a more organic nature to it than 1941.
The advantage here goes to Animal House, by a landslide. While Zemekis and Gale went on to bigger and better things from here, Ramis did too, in front of and behind the camera, and I can't help but wonder how much funnier the world would be if Kenny hadn't left us after giving us Caddyshack. For those not familiar with Doug Kenney, he also had screen roles in Animal House (as Stork) and Caddyshack (he had a brief, silent cameo as one of the guests at the big party at the club the night before the big golf match).
Part III:Cast: Goliath vs. David
Even with sharing Tim Matheson and John Belushi, 1941's cast outshines Animal House's by orders of magnitude, despite the latter having a cast that had many bright futures ahead of them. And it's here that I really have to ding Spielberg.
For starters, he put the extremely talented and mostly physical comedic talent of John Belushi in the cockpit of an airplane, and one of his sight gags (falling off the wing of his plane) was an accident that was luckily captured on film. He had Christopher Lee and Toshiro Mifune sharing the screen in a cramped, dimly lit submarine and surrounded by the Keystone Cops in Japanese sailor uniforms. Dan Aykroyd is one of my all-time favorites and a master of creating and inhabiting characters, but I think in this film, Spielberg gave him too much space to improvise; he probably just said '
okay, Dan, your character took a blow to the head from a tank turret and you were out for a while. GO!'. On the other hand, Slim Pickens, Treat Williams, John Candy, Ned Beatty and most of the rest of the cast hit the marks they were good at. Commendable, but that's what supporting characters are supposed to do, and they were better at their jobs than half of the more 'main' characters. To me, Spielberg dropped the ball by not 'directing' the bigger names more, or at the very least, not recognizing that he wasn't getting their funniest possible performances.
In Animal House, the cast was full of solid character actors, while a young Kevin Bacon has had the busiest career of all, others put in memorable performances in future productions as well: Tom Hulce was nominated for an Oscar for Amadeus, as well as nominations for mutiple Tony Awards for his work on Broadway; Karen Allen (Raiders of the Lost Ark); Bruce McGill (of many, his role on the series finale of Quantum Leap is the first to my mind); and Mark Metcalf, who channeled just enough of his Neidermeyer character into his Maestro character on Seinfeld to be equally memorable. The 'kids' in this film were definitely front and center, though veteran actor John Vernon's Dean Wormer is top 20 all-time for menace, and even Donald Sutherland got to do Donald Sutherland stuff in this one.
While the sheer talent edge goes to 1941, the collective performances by the Animal House cast gives them the edge here.
Part IV: Execution of script: Actual vs. Scripted Chaos
This is the reason I picked Animal House to compare 1941 to. 1941 had no one central theme other than the time of the events, just multiple stories occurring at the same time, while Animal House had the central theme of Delta house vs. The World.
Both films also had an action-packed 'chaotic' climax, but one made little sense (1941), and the other was a planned descent into mayhem (Animal House). 1941 had bigger explosions, vehicle crashes and general destruction, but it wasn't as satisfying as the turmoil that culminated with the appearance of and havoc wrought by the Deathmobile.
Conclusion
From our current perspective, putting these two against each other was a lopsided affair, but in the context of their times, two young directors with one being WAY more successful than the other and with a much better cast, you can see that expectations were in Spielberg's favor. Why he didn't deliver, as I hope you readers will agree, is varied but clear; 1941 was a mess on paper, dealt with a setting where finding comedy is tough, and ultimately it was too ambitious due to its embarrassment of riches in cast and director.
What's odd to me is that Spielberg has dropped hilarious moments into his movies (Indy getting hit in the jaw by the mirror in Raiders still makes me
over 40 years on), they only come in the context of a larger dramatic story, and the closest he ever came to a comedy after 1941 was Hook (and it's next to impossible to make Robin Williams not funny, so little credit there). Kubrick needed Peter Sellers to help him get the hang of comedy; I wonder if it's too late for Spielberg to find his own comedy muse, or if he's even interested at this point.