YMMV / Meatballs

• First Installment Wins: The original movie is a well-regarded classic, being Bill Murray's first major film role and a great comedy that's surprisingly light on vulgar humor and features some decent Character Development. The sequels are increasingly hit-or-miss, losing Murray and increasing the raunchiness more and more in the hopes of ripping off Porky's.
• Older Than They Think: The theme song, "Makin' It", was actually written and performed by David Naughton for his TV series Makin' It, which only lasted nine episodes earlier in 1979. Some pressings of the song say it was produced for Meatballs.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Development of the fourth film (then titled Happy Campers) was marred by Jack Nance's wife, Kelly Jean Van Dyke, calling the production and threatening to commit suicide. By the time Nance, the film's director and a local deputy-sheriff reached her, she had hung herself.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Keith Knight, who plays Fink, would go on to voice Lowly Worm in the Busy World of Richard Scarry.
  • Harvey Atkin, who plays Morty, would go on to play as Bowser Koopa in the Mario cartoons and Sam.
  • The third film is notable for featuring the acting debuts of Caroline Rhea (of Sabrina the Teenage Witch fame), in an uncredited role, and Patrick Dempsey (of Grey's Anatomy fame) as the lead character.
• Sequelitis: The original film suffered from a series of increasingly bad follow-ups, two of which were unrelated projects that were rebranded under the "Meatballs" banner, and featured much more T&A and crass humor.
• Spiritual Successor: To Animal House. It helps that Ivan Reitman and Harold Ramis worked on that film as well.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The first film presents Tripper and Roanne as a case of Belligerent Sexual Tension but to modern audiences, certain scenes between them come across more like Tripper sexually harassing Roxanne and not suffering any consequences for it.
  • The "moral" presented in the third film, with a porn star telling a 14 year-old boy (and later, a 14 year-old girl) that "no means yes" and he should be willing to lie about who he is in order to get what he wants (to the point that he is so forceful on a woman that she's forced to knee him in the groin to get him to stop), may have played well to audiences in The '80s, but it would be impossible to replicate in a film made in the modern age.
  • The third film also presents a situation where a woman called the "Sex Goddess" is subjected to Slut-Shaming by the entire population of the nearby camp, as they're convinced that she's such a Sex God that she requires her "husband" (actually her brother, pretending to act as her husband) to protect her from a horde of suitors knocking down her door. The finale of the film has Rudy lean into this perception by not only pretending to have sex with her (in order to lead the rest of the camp into thinking he lost his virginity), but throw an intervening suitor out of a second-storey window — the latter of whom is paralyzed, no less. The woman's brother very nearly beats Rudy to death in a rage before the "Goddess" explains that she's just a regular woman (albeit, played by Shannon Tweed) who spends all her time studying... while dressed in lacy clothing, playing completely into this perception. This situation is presented as a funny and generally good thing, even though some/all of these individuals could have been charged with assault or attempted murder.

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