New Line Cinema’s outrageous comedy “Vacation” starring Ed Helms, Christina Applegate and Chris Hemsworth, marks the big screen return of the Griswold clan—and their epically disastrous family outings.
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.





