And Boy, Does It Ever Have a Lot to Atone For
By Drew Gallagher
The movie Revenge of the Nerds turns 40 next year and has often been cited as an able successor to the Animal House genre while helping to launch and further the careers of such heavyweight actors as Anthony Edwards, John Goodman, and Robert Carradine of the acting Carradines. Though not considered a classic on the level of Animal House—which has its own set of problems, let’s be honest—it spawned a Revenge of the Nerds franchise that included numerous sequels and a couple of television ventures and effectively erased all Carradine’s prior acting accomplishments, which had been substantial. Watching the comedy today uncovers glaring aspects of the film that have not aged well, and I’m not just referencing the homophobia, racism, and rape, though we should probably start there in dissecting this iconic film.
In a scene toward the end of the film, the head cheerleader and stereotype, Betty Childs, is jilted by quarterback and boyfriend Ted McGinley who is despondent and not interested in having sex in a kids’ bouncy house after the football team loses the homecoming competition to the Nerds. Head Nerd Lewis notices that the quarterback has discarded his Darth Vader mask so puts it on and follows Betty, who has wandered off along to the bouncy house. Betty asks Darth to remove his mask, but Lewis, who is really smart because of the glasses he wears, realizes that would ruin his ruse and declines to reveal himself. Betty finds this kinky, and they then have sex. Remarkably, no one else walks into the bouncy house while it’s going on. Only after Betty has what she says is the best sex of her life does Lewis reveal his true identity. There’s a word for Lewis’s deception, of course, and the word is rape—a staple, god help us, of ’80s teen comedies.
The filmmakers on some level were aware of the problems with the rape scene, so they worked overtime to find ways to justify it. Earlier in the film, Betty jilts Lewis at the kissing booth even though he has bought a fistful of tickets and is expecting to cash them in. Betty is a pawn used by the football team to repeatedly lure Lewis into situations that blow up on him and his nerd friends. Betty Childs, in short, is evil and, in the filmmakers’ minds, anyway, gets what’s coming to her. Lewis, on the other hand, in his cockeyed optimism and innocence, is a hero to the robot-making crowd and is thus rewarded, if you can call it that, by getting to have sex with the woman who rejected him. She had, after all, never bothered to get to know the true Lewis. The filmmakers keep piling on the rape justifications by beating viewers over the head with assurances that Betty enjoys the sex. Not only that, but she’s fallen in love with Lewis by the time the credits roll 10 minutes later. They even get married in one of the sequels.
Meanwhile, the breezy examples of homophobia and racism in the film are almost too numerous to name.
Still, those aren’t the only problems with the film. Not to minimize these deeply troubling aspects that were considered normal rather than appalling and were regularly mined for comic effect in the ’80s and ’90s, but I have always been perplexed by the Adams College football team—the Adams Atoms, surely the tiniest Division I squad ever.
In 1987’s Teen Wolf, the filmmakers have the opposing player/villain stand on the baseline and glare at Michael J. Fox while he shoots the winning free throws, when obviously the villain should have been standing along the key with his defensive teammates. And yes, this galled me much more than a werewolf being allowed to play high school basketball.
Revenge of the Nerds has similar credibility issues with the size of its football team. The Adams Atoms rule the university, which is purported to also have the best computer department in the nation. The conflict between the two is inevitable. (Not saying that football players can’t be brilliant scientific minds, but I’d like to see Ogre’s SAT scores.) When the football team burns down their own fraternity house during a party at the beginning of the film, the coach, a very young John Goodman, tells the dean that his boys need a place to sleep. The obvious solution is to have Goodman’s players run over to the freshman dorm, throw out all the first-years, and take over their rooms. This is the first moment in the film when viewers get an inkling that this is a really small team. Forty freshmen get the boot from their dorm rooms, but only a handful of players move in. Sure, the football players want rooms to themselves, so maybe they simply convert doubles to singles. And maybe not all the football players are members of the same fraternity, so it’s possible that the rest of the team is staying somewhere else on campus or in different off-campus housing. We simply have to suspend our disbelief at this moment in the film and hope that there is a scene with a practice, or an actual game, to better address the depleted football roster problem.
That scene shortly arrives when the trodden-upon nerds begin their titular revenge against the jocks by secretly entering the football team’s locker room before practice and sprinkling liquid heat onto a mountain of jockstraps. (I cannot believe that access to the locker room at Georgia or Clemson would have been so easy even in 1984.) The players, of course, put on the jockstraps without noticing how wet they are and head out onto the practice field, where the burning soon kicks in.
No sooner are they on the field than they’re racing back inside to tear off the searing jockstraps, leaving Coach John Goodman to utter one of the famous lines from the film: “Shit, we forgot to practice.” It is at this practice where the small number of players involved in the Adams Atoms football program becomes blatantly obvious, ridiculously too few for any self-respecting Division I program. (I am basing their status on the fact that Goodman refers to playing in a bowl game that season as the team’s goal. Only D-1 teams get bowl games.)
Just to be sure I wasn’t leaping to conclusions, I sought out an expert—a pal of mine, Myles Hodish, a former football player at Florida State University—to confirm my suspicions. Could a D1 team like the Atoms make a bowl game with a roster of fewer than 20?
“I don’t believe a team with 20 or fewer players would make a trip to a bowl game now or even back in 1984,” Myles said in a lengthy email response, much longer than the question deserved, to be honest. “I don’t think a team with 22 players is enough and would win even one game in college football, let alone win enough to qualify for a bowl appearance. I think at a minimum a team at the D1 level would need at least 35 players to be remotely competitive in a single game, but they still would be worn out over the course of an 11- or 12-game season. To last a whole season, taking into account injuries, exhaustion, special teams, and specific players, I think a D1 team would need at least 45 players to win about half its games. Even then they better be the best-conditioned, strongest, biggest, and fastest team in the nation to keep up with a team that has about 75 scholarship players on the roster. They better be lucky not to get hit with too many injuries.”
Ted McGinley, who plays the quarterback for the Adams Atoms and also starred in Married…with Children, certainly looks the part of the star quarterback, but I’m not sure he could withstand the punishment of a full season behind an offensive line that does not appear to have a single player weighing in at 200 pounds. Ogre could probably play offensive line, but he’s listed as a defensive stalwart during the homecoming introduction of Atoms players.
So perhaps it’s fitting at film’s end when Queen’s “We Are the Champions” is playing to celebrate the universal dominance of the Nerds. It’s obvious that the football team could never be champions at the Division 1 level—or any level.
(Of note—there is an Adams State University in Colorado and it competes in Division II for football, where there is a playoff system rather than bowl games. They are now known as the Grizzlies after dropping “Indians” as their name a few years ago. They were likely not the inspiration for the Adams Atoms.)
The internet has been justifiably outraged by the rape scene in Revenge of the Nerds for many years, and even though Betty and Lewis start a family (I think it’s Revenge of the Nerds IV but I stopped watching the franchise about halfway through Revenge of the Nerds—Nerds in Paradise), the beginning of their relationship would have to be awkward at family Thanksgivings or any time one of their kids watches a Star Wars movie. (“Hey Dad, isn’t that the costume you used to assault Mom?” Insert Lewis’ nerd laugh.)
Critics have been less vocal about the Adam Atoms and their undermanned football team, for obvious reasons. Still, as the movie turns 40, time to set the record straight once and for all.
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Drew Gallagher is a freelance writer who lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He is the second most prolific book reviewer and first video book reviewer in the 136-year history of the Free Lance-Star newspaper and hopes to become the second most prolific book reviewer in the 136-day history of Fredericksburg Advance. You can find some of his video book reviews at Fredericksburg.com.
