'Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp' Is Older, Weirder, and Just as Good as the Original

Warning: Light spoilers ahead.

In the same way that camp life isn't real life, our camp selves aren't our real selves. Or maybe our camp selves are our hyper selves: exaggerated, lustful, fearless, occasionally violent or rogue extensions of us, our ultimate id selves that emerge in those summer weeks devoid of parents and enforceable rules. It's a time for firsts and experimentation, like a trial run for late adolescence. In one of my favorite camp stories, a friend of mine, Chris, explored his repressed homosexuality at a Christian camp, of all places, the summer before eighth grade. "One night, after our counselor had gone to sleep, my cabinmates and I sat around in a circle, daring each other to show everyone our dicks," Chris told me. "This one guy got all of the attention due to his extra hard, extra large cock. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before. So I dared him to touch my dick, which he did. Then, he dared me to touch his, and I did, probably for much longer than he held mine. The next day, he came to me with complete regret and said we should never have done that. But all I could think about was how wonderful and unexpected the whole evening had been."

David Wain and Michael Showalter's 2001 film Wet Hot American Summer, set on the last day of camp at the fictional Camp Firewood in the year 1981, took the already ridiculous, reckless, formative moments that define camp life and exaggerated them to full-blown absurdity. Michael Ian Black and Bradley Cooper, for instance, play counselors who acknowledge their attraction to one another, get it on in a toolshed, then get married. The camp's sci-fi nerds, led by David Hyde Pierce and Janeane Garofalo, prevent a falling piece of NASA's Skylab from crashing directly into the camp. The camp cook (Christopher Meloni) suffers from PTSD after serving in Vietnam, and is guided to spiritual enlightenment by a talking can of vegetables that claims to be able to suck its own dick. And Molly Shannon, the arts and crafts counselor, in the fallout of a failed marriage, in turn falls in love with one of her pubescent campers. Wain and Showalter's camp served as a petri dish for breeding the next generation of comedic weirdos. The film, however, bombed hard at the box office, only bringing in a little over $295,000.

Over the years, though, the film became a cult favorite. In an interview with Time, Janeane Garofalo recalled being approached on the street and outside standup shows by young fans who would quote the film to her, years after its release. Business Insider credits the rise of the DVD for spawning an underground movement of WHAS fans, who began attending midnight screenings in costume (the ultimate mark of cult status).

And now, today, 14 years after the film's release, Netflix has released Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, an eight-episode prequel starring the entire original cast, plus Jon Hamm, John Slattery, Jason Schwartzmann, Kristen Wiig, and Michael Cera, among other guest stars.

The fact that the original actors are 15 years older than they were when the film was released, yet are still reprising their characters two months before the events of the film, is precisely the joy of the show. In 2001, they were already too old to play teenage camp counselors. A decade and a half later, the effects of their aging and our understanding of what these actors have done in the time since make for some highly meta humor. Where Bradley Cooper was relatively unknown prior to the film, it's impossible to separate the Cooper of First Day of Camp—constantly trying to avoid Amy Poehler's advances—from the ubiquitous A-lister we know him as now. Likewise, Poehler and Paul Rudd are now comedy mainstays, and watching them together recalls all the moments we've seen them perform together since the original film's release (e.g., Parks and Rec, David Wain's rom-com parody They Came Together). Christopher Meloni was already a star on Law & Order: SVU when the film was released, but watching him skip menacingly after Ken Marino through a forest while yelling, "I'm going to smoke you out, like a salmon," is worth a Netflix subscription on its own.

It's Michael Showalter's transformation, however, that makes for the purest physical comedy in the show. Fourteen years ago, he was a romantic lead, the floppy brown-haired, conventionally cute boy pining after the camp's hottest female counselor (Marguerite Moreau). Now he's 45—and it shows. First Day of Camp plays this up hard, putting him in tight shirts with the sleeves cut off, a puka-shell choker that only serves to accentuate the sheer size of his neck and double chin, and Netflix's Worst Wig.

Wain and Showalter directly address these age differences, as well as the absurdity of adults playing children. A 12- or 13-year-old girl suddenly gets her period for the first time, runs into a bathroom stall, and emerges transformed into a 40-year-old Marisa Ryan. In a move that parodies Never Been Kissed, a 41-year-old Elizabeth Banks plays a 24-year-old journalist going undercover as a 16-year-old counselor at the camp. Her trick for passing as a teen? A single side barrette.

Everything fans loved about the original Wet Hot American Summer—the sendup of coming-of-age films, the tightly packed jokes, the ironic campiness—only gets better in the show. Stretching out over four hours, First Day of Camp gives itself breathing room to explore bizarre character backstories to frame the many subplots we remember from the film. The cook is revealed to be the sole possessor of a secret government code that makes him the target of a hired assassin (played by Jon Hamm) working for President Ronald Reagan (also played by Michael Showalter). David Hyde Pierce is shown disgracefully falling from his position as a "damned good" professor of astrophysics when an altercation with his academic rival turns violent. And the romance between Michael Ian Black and Bradley Cooper is sparked when they are assigned to wear a two-person zoot suit for Camp Firewood's annual counselors' musical.

We're a world inclined to distrust prequels and sequels on principle, but Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp makes the campers and counselors who populate Camp Firewood all the sillier, all the weirder and grosser, and we're all the better for it.