Eric Idle Still Has the Unproduced ‘Vacation’ Sequel Script He Wrote With Chevy Chase
Proving that he doesn’t just use social media to feud with John Cleese, Eric Idle recently took to the internet to answer a series of fan questions. For example, when asked whether or not Charlie Chaplin was a fan of Monty Python, he revealed that… an elderly Chaplin once appeared to him in a dream and helped him combat anxiety? Did that even answer the question?
Idle also confirmed that he once wrote an unproduced, Australia-set Vacation sequel with Chevy Chase, and still has a copy of the original script in his possession.
As you might remember, Idle briefly appeared in National Lampoon’s European Vacation, the critically-reviled follow-up to National Lampoon’s Vacation, playing a cyclist who keeps getting inadvertently brutalized by the Griswolds.
In the film’s wacky conclusion, Clark Griswold drives his car into a Roman fountain during a high-speed chase, inadvertently knocking the cursed bike enthusiast in as well.
As Idle told author Kim “Howard” Johnson for the book Life Before and After Monty Python, originally the scene called for no dialogue. When Chase approached the actor on set with some last-minute rewrites containing fresh lines, Idle had to refuse. Apparently, knowing that no speaking was required for the day’s shoot, Idle had stayed up all night partying and singing with Keith Richards and completely lost his voice. “So I don’t speak there, I just flounder about in the water,” Idle explained.
Despite this hiccup, Chase and Idle got along so well that they decided to collaborate on a sequel to European Vacation that would shift the action to Australia. “It’s a little-known fact that I wrote a Vacation for Chevy,” Idle told Johnson. “We spent some time working together on it. It had some nice shark gags, But I can’t pretend it was in any way finished.”
Not too much is known about this unmade sequel, although if multiple “shark gags” were the highlight of the script, it probably couldn’t have been all that great. While Idle doesn’t explain why the project never came to fruition, just the year after European Vacation came out, Crocodile Dundee hit theaters, so perhaps they didn’t want to oversaturate the market with more Aussie-themed Hollywood comedies.
Reportedly, the idea of an Australian Vacation movie (sans Idle) was later floated as a potential fifth movie after 1997’s Vegas Vacation, but this, too, never happened.
Chase did get the chance to bring his slapstick antics Down Under via a series of conspicuously Vacation-like commercials for Australia’s AAMI insurance. They’re kind of like mini Vacation movies, but where Clark has a whole new family, presumably because Ellen finally came to her senses and divorced the clumsy horndog.
Judging from Idle’s recent post, their Vacation Down Under script still exists in a physical form — and if he’s as hard up for dough as he says, an unproduced Vacation script full of killer shark jokes would likely fetch a high price on eBay.
You (yes, you) should follow JM on Twitter (if it still exists by the time you’re reading this).
