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5 People ‘SNL’ Hurt More Than It Helped
Alyson Lewis
February 21, 2024
Welcome to the Cracked newsletter!
This issue is about allegations against Brian Peck, an oral history of ‘Eurotrip',’ trivia, statistics, solid burns, forgettable movies, and much more.
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Since Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer were all teens in the 1980s, they grew up watching the same kinds of movies. Sex comedies like Weird Science and Real Genius were wildly popular back then, and they were one of the things the trio bonded over when they first met at Harvard.
After writing for The Harvard Lampoon, they began working in television, eventually landing in the Seinfeld writers’ room, where they wrote some of the most memorable episodes of the show’s final seasons. After Seinfeld ended, they transitioned into film, often working as script doctors to punch up comedies. But they wanted to direct their own movies, too. When it came to what kind of movies those would be, they went back to the sex comedies they’d watched as teens. Out of that came Ugly Americans, which would later be renamed EuroTrip in a very deliberate attempt by DreamWorks to trick the audience into thinking they were buying tickets to a Road Trip sequel.
Every now and then, the coming-of-age sitcom Boy Meets World took on sensitive subject matter. Today, stars Rider Strong and Will Friedle delivered some of their most serious behind-the-scenes stories about the show on their rewatch podcast, Pod Meets World.
Between 1997 and 1999, actor and producer Brian Peck appeared in a small handful of episodes of Boy Meets World in both stand-in and supporting roles. Despite being at most a guest star whose on-screen impact on the show was mostly minimal, Peck ingratiated himself to stars Strong and Friedle, who played Shawn and Eric respectively. Very quickly, Peck became one of the closest confidants to Strong and Friedle, spending almost every day with the two teen stars despite being 20 years their senior. And, when Peck was tried and convicted for sexually abusing a 16-year-old Nickelodeon actor in 2004, Strong and Friedle attended his trial in support of their friend and even wrote letters to the presiding judge advocating for Peck’s character.
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