
The Griswolds first hit the screen in 1983 with the release of John Hughes’s and Harold Ramis’s zeitgeist-shifting “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” based on Hughes’s short stories in the eponymous humor magazine. The film became a global phenomenon and opened the way for the Griswolds to bumble through an escalating series of hilarious highs and gut-bustingly funny lows in the three subsequent films that followed—1985’s “National Lampoon’s European Vacation,” 1989’s “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and 1997’s “Vegas Vacation.” Collectively, the films have introduced a litany of outrageous one-liners into the American cultural lexicon, and garnered generations of fans.