Wet Hot American Summer: The Greatest Comedy You've Never Heard Of

Wet Hot American Summer may be the greatest comedy you've never heard of.

That's surprising, really, because when you look at the cast of the 2001 movie it's jam-packed with A-list actors and top-shelf comedic talent — everyone from Parks And Recreation's Amy Poehler and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit's Christopher Meloni to Ant-Man star Paul Rudd and Pitch Perfect's Elizabeth Banks. Yet when it was released over a decade ago, Wet Hot American Summer sank like a stone.

There are reasons for this, of course: Very few of the people involved were household names at the time; the summer-camp setting is a bit foreign to viewers outside the US; its sense of humour is unabashedly weird at times.

"We had remained collaborative with so many people involved in the movie over the years."

But there's no keeping a good comedy down and over the years the movie gained a cult reputation that grew and grew, and it didn't hurt that many of its stars went on to bigger things. Of course, there was talk of a sequel, but nothing really came of it until streaming service Netflix gave the green light to an eight-episode prequel that would tell the story of the first day at Camp Firewood circa 1981 for the campers, counselors and staff.

One of the main jokes of the original was that the actors playing the teenage counselors all looked at least ten years too old for the roles they were playing. And Wet Hot American Summer: First Day Of Camp pushes that button even harder by bringing back all the original actors nearly 15 years later to play the same characters, only even younger.

It's a delightfully absurd move on the part of Michael Showalter and David Wain, the creators of the movie and the TV series (the two also have acting roles). But it also speaks volumes about the enduring appeal of Wet Hot American Summer that they were able to secure the services of now big names like Poehler, Rudd and American Sniper's Bradley Cooper, as well as landing the likes of Star Trek's Chris Pine, Bridesmaids' Kristen Wiig, The Good Wife's Josh Charles and Mad Men stars John Slattery and Jon Hamm.

"We had remained collaborative with so many people involved in the movie over the years, and we felt our cast would want to do it again, so bringing everyone back was never far from our minds," Wain explains. "It was just a matter of when would be the right time. A few years back, the ten-year anniversary of the film generated some renewed interest and that's when we got interested in what would come next."

However, rather than try to fit their wealth of ideas into a feature film, Showalter and Wain were keen to explore other avenues. And Netflix seemed the ideal choice. "We had so much more material than would fit into a feature film, so many more characters and storylines we were excited about," Showalter admits. "It felt organic to us to tell the story of the first day of camp, certainly this time. We thought about those stories when we created the first movie but we didn't use them. We found that working backwards and telling the story of how we got to everything that happens on the last day of camp in the movie was so much fun."