National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation

John Hughes wrote it from his own short story Christmas ’59, published in National Lampoon in December 1980 and built from his memories of Christmas 1959. Chris Columbus was hired to direct first; when he left, Hughes sent him the Home Alone script instead and Jeremiah S. Chechik took over. The road trip shape of the earlier entries is dropped completely. Everything is locked to one house, so each gag has to come from a relative at the door or an object inside the place, which makes the rhythm circular rather than forward moving. The engine of the plot is an unpaid Christmas bonus: Clark is financing 25,000 imported lights and a houseful of visitors with money he has not been given yet, and the chain of disasters feeds off that. The Griswold house and street were built at the Warner Bros. Ranch in Burbank, the tree hunting sequence in Summit County, Colorado. Mae Questel, who plays Aunt Bethany, had voiced Betty Boop and Olive Oyl for years; this was her last screen appearance. A good fit if you accept that the laughs come from each new arrival and each failing appliance rather than from any plot. Not for anyone who finds the same joke tiring by the third time; the lights, the squirrel and Eddie are deliberately looped.