Is Shooter McGavin a Ghost in the New ‘Happy Gilmore’ Sequel?
After months of wild rumors and stories about desperate New Jerseyans sacrificing their basic human dignity for the chance to become a background extra, Netflix finally delivered a trailer for Happy Gilmore 2. The 45-second teaser includes glimpses of a bearded Happy, the return of Julie Bowen’s character Virginia and a whole bunch of gratuitous celebrity cameos.
Then, the final moments of the trailer feature its biggest reveal: the return of villainous pro-golfer and self-described shit-eater Shooter McGavin. This should come as no surprise, considering that actor Christopher McDonald was the one who leaked the news of the sequel’s existence earlier this year.
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But there’s something very odd about Shooter’s appearance in this trailer. For one thing, he’s inexplicably wearing pajamas. For another, he’s in a cemetery, lurking around a grave marked “Peterson,” presumably belonging to Happy’s late mentor Chubbs Peterson. Why would anybody visit a cemetery in their pajamas? They wouldn’t. Which begs the question: Is Shooter McGavin a g-g-ghost??
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Okay, admittedly, this sounds a little ridiculous, but Shooter being dead would explain his dressed-down presence in the cemetery. It would also explain why that’s the only place we see him in the trailer; for instance, there’s no footage of him and Happy battling it out on the links. And the last time we ever saw Shooter McGavin, he had stolen Happy’s championship jacket and was being chased by a bloodthirsty mob. Then we hear Shooter screaming for his life, accompanied by the sounds of him being violently pummeled off-screen by Mr. Larson, the character played by the 7-foot-1 Richard Kiel.
That means there’s a very good chance that Shooter McGavin didn’t survive the events of the first Happy Gilmore. So it wouldn’t be a huge leap to suggest that his role in the sequel will be limited to that of a specter. Would that mean that Happy Gilmore has some sort of Sixth Sense-esque ability to commune with the dead? Well, we’ve actually seen him do that already.
In the final moments of the first movie, he receives a friendly wave from the ghosts of Chubbs, his alligator frenemy and Abraham Lincoln. Nobody else notices them except for Happy.
So ghosts do indeed exist in the Happy Gilmore-verse, it would seem, and Happy is the only person who is able to see them.
Making Shooter McGavin a pajama-clad poltergeist wouldn’t be the worst idea. It would be a wacky twist to be sure, but it would also indicate that the sequel is willing to take big narrative swings, rather than simply rehash the original movie’s story beats like so many other belated sequels.
Perhaps the best evidence against this theory is the fact that Christopher McDonald hasn’t already spoiled it for everyone.
