Yeah!
Yeah, baby!
Spank me, Daddy!
Spank me!
Hit that high C!
This was Steven Stifler of the first American Pie.
And this was Steven Stifler in the final film
of the core franchise, American Reunion.
The sooner you realize that you're the [BLEEP],,
not the boss, the better off you'll be.
[BLEEP]
What was that?
Nothing.
Nothing, Mr. Duraiswamy.
Whenever a character in a franchise
unexpectedly pops with an audience,
it can be very tempting for the powers that
be behind the scenes to drive that character into the ground
in future installments.
In the case of Stifler, the character
who was once a beloved comedic breakout
quickly dwindled in the eyes of fans.
The character became the embodiment
of what happens when a franchise tries to bring a side
character to the forefront without remembering
what made the character successful in the first place.
But before we bake up this critical pie,
make sure you subscribe to Nerdstalgic so you never
miss a video.
Released in 1999, American Pie was a throwback
to the '70s and '80s sex comedies
like Porky's or Animal House.
Its brash, in your face comedic sensibility
pushed the boundaries of good taste
and was a massive hit with audiences in theaters
and eventually home video.
On a mere $11 million budget, it ended up
raking in over $200 million.
The film follows a group of high school friends
who make a pact to lose their virginity by graduation.
We will get laid!
Stickler's role in the film, though, is largely extraneous.
Although he is friends with the central characters,
he is not part of the virginity contract,
and so he's left out of much of the film's conflict.
What?
Whatever.
He's there to provide comedic flavor to the film,
not to be a driving force of the plot.
He's portrayed as your typical party animal comedic archetype.
despite the film having an ensemble cast,
Sean William Scott was undoubtedly
the film's breakout star.
The raunchy, unapologetic humor of Stifler
became one of the film's highlights.
I'll tell you one thing though.
I don't think he's going to have problem [BLEEP] school anymore.
Perhaps the clearest evidence of this
is the way Scott's stardom escalated between each film.
Popular movies like Final Destination, Road Trip,
and Dude Where's My Car cemented Scott
as a rapidly growing comedic on screen presence.
Meanwhile, his American Pie co-stars largely
appeared in middling comedies, never quite hitting
the same heights as the American Pie films,
with the exception of Alyson Hannigan, who already
had a following through Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and later co-starring in How I Met Your Mother.
Scott's post Pie success and the popularity
of Stifler in the first film led the filmmakers
to the logical conclusion of making
Stifler a bigger part of the franchise's future plot lines.
The gradual degradation of the character
begins in American Pie 2.
Stifler is given a larger role that's mostly entertaining,
but Stifler is less a character and more
of a joke delivery mechanism.
I got laid 23 times this year, and I'm not
counting the hummer I got in the library stacks, baby.
Sure, he's been given a larger role
within the plot of American Pie 2,
but his role just feels like an overinflated rehash
of the last film.
His primary character arc can really only
be described as trying to get a pair of women
into a threesome, which spoiler warning, he succeeds at.
Granted, American Pie 2 isn't trying
to do anything with the character that's
all that divergent from the first film.
Stifler's primary job in film one and two
is to be a comedic side character,
and the sequel largely pulls it off.
Because he doesn't have to do any heavy lifting dramatically
or in the film's conflict, he continues
to be the entertaining bit player audiences loved
the first time around.
This film could have been the place
to provide Stifler with more depth that could have supported
the character moving forward.
The choice to make Stifler one of the primary characters
in the subsequent movies wouldn't
have been so disastrous if we had spent more time making
Stifler into a three dimensional character
in either of the first two films.
Even Scott admitted in a 2019 interview
with Entertainment Weekly to rewriting elements
of the character way back in the first film
to make him more likable.
Scott told EW--
The Stifler character was in two or three scenes,
and he was written to be such [BLEEP] hole that I
was like, I don't even know if I'd want to play this guy.
Scott could see from the first movie
that the character needed work, but this idea
of the guy who wants to be loved the most
never comes through in a dramatic or emotionally
satisfying way in any of the films,
despite the filmmakers' attempts late in the franchise.
The minute Stifler becomes more than a colorful side character
in the third film, American Wedding,
is where things really begin to fall apart.
In American Wedding, we are left with an emotionally flimsy plot
line that hinges on Stifler and Jim's friendship
being some vital element to the series.
At no point in the previous two films
do we get any real sense of Stifler's relationship
with any of the individual central group of characters.
He often seems like the barely tolerated braggart,
so it's hard to believe that he has
a uniquely special relationship specifically with Jim.
Without that investment, much of American Wedding's conflicts
just aren't compelling.
The film strains us to get us invested
in the ongoing conflict of Stifler's repeated failures
to make Jim's wedding a success.
It also doesn't help that numerous side characters don't
appear in this installment, including Chris Klein's Oz, who
always felt like more of an actual friend of Jim
and the other central characters than Stifler.
By elevating Stifler to this larger role,
the series truly begins to develop diminishing returns
on the character and his humor.
The outrageous sex jokes that once made Stifler
such an unexpected and unpredictable source of comedy
have now grown stale.
These problems are exacerbated even further
by American Reunion, the belated 2012 sequel intended to cap off
the American Pie saga.
Here, Stifler is essentially one of the emotional cruxes
of the film.
He is a pathetic depiction of a man whose life peaked
in high school, now working a dead end
job with a demeaning boss.
The rejection he faces by his high school friends
is meant to be tragic.
Jessica, it's good to see you.
No it wasn't.
What the--
But it all seems like a reasonable response
to a guy who hasn't matured since the end of high school.
None of the groundwork has been laid
for an emotionally satisfying arc,
and therefore, the audience feels nothing.
So what can we learn from all of this?
Perhaps the most important takeaway
is that less is often more.
When a character unexpectedly hits big with an audience,
it's easy to want to immediately increase that character's
role in a story.
Perhaps the best illustration of this
is Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean.
Like Stifler, a character who was once a colorful side
character was eventually elevated
into essentially the series' primary protagonist.
By doing this, those brief flashes
of comedy and quirky characterization
become tired, rote, and most fatally, predictable.
Now that's not to say a side character can't ever
be elevated to lead status.
Perhaps the best and most recent example of this
is Breaking Bad's Saul Goodman, who was, in a way,
a Stifler type.
He was a character with a brief plot adjacent role
that would have an impact in big comedic moments.
Saul not only grew in prominence in Breaking Bad,
he became the lead of the spinoff Better Call Saul.
The key here is simply depth of character.
By providing Saul Goodman with clear motivations, backstory,
and desires, we came to understand
why he acted the way he did and saw him
as more than comedic relief or a cool background character.
Unlike Stifler, he was a real character
that we could relate to.
Without this understanding of Stifler's inner psychology,
even if it were revealed to be comedic,
we don't care about the struggles
the series puts him through later on in the franchise.
As Scott himself said in the EW interview--
He's probably really insecure.
He's like the guy who wants to be loved the most.
There is something that does feel tragic
about Stifler, the man whose life will inevitably
peak in high school.
OK.
What makes you a little [BLEEP] think
you can crash one of the Stifmeister's parties?
Did you just refer to yourself as the Stifmeister?
--and who likely hides his insecurities
behind his brash sense of humor, but we never
get any sense of this side of the character
in the early installments when it matters most.
Any attempts to make Stifler more than a bit player later
in the franchise are dead on arrival
because he is just a bunch of sex
jokes in the form of a person.
Come on guys, that was pretty funny.
Yeah, maybe in high school it was funny.
Now it's just a felony.
Sometimes it's better to let a character--
even one as beloved as Stifler--
stay a supporting player rather than elevating them
to the starring role.
What do you think?
Was there more that could have been done to save Stifler?
Or was the character best left as comedic relief?
Let us know what you think, and don't forget to like, comment,
and subscribe to Nerdstalgic.