There’s less than a week left to get in on the ground floor of The Devastator’s Wet Hot American Summer: Fantasy Camp Kickstarter, and for anybody on the fence, ComicBook.com has an exclusive first look at five character sheets from the forthcoming role-playing game.
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The comedy publisher will bring the cult-hit summer camp movie to life as a role-playing game later this year after successfully funding over $15,000 — which means that soon, you will be able to buy a copy of the book and play as McKinley, Gene, or a handful of other off-the-wall characters from the bizarre and wonderful film.
Fans who pledge to the Kickstarter can get perks like early access as well as add-ons like bottles of dick cream (yes, really).
The original film, released in 2001, took place 20 years earlier at an early-’80s summer camp. It was a loving and profane send-up of ’80s summer camp movies and pop culture, and became a cult classic almost immediately.
It was revived in 2015 as Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, a prequel series that explored the first encounters of the characters weeks before the original film. It starred all of the same actors, who were not entirely age-appropriate for their “teenager” roles in 2001 and even less so for a prequel series that was created more than a decade later.
You can check out player profiles and character sheets for Andy (Paul Rudd), Gail (Molly Shannon), Gene (Christopher Meloni), Katie (Marguerite Moreau), and Neil (Joe Lo Truglio) below. Lo Truglio and Moreau were among the cast and crew members who participated in the creation of the game, consulting on the creation of their characters’ sheets.
ANDY
Andy is the guy most likely to think he was way too cool to play a tabletop game (not that most of the characters probably wouldn’t have thought that in 1981, but still).
He’s the cool guy who all the girls kind of like, whose entire raison d’etre at camp is to have fun, score, and get paid to do nothing. In one famous scene in the movie, he gets so caught up in a make-out session that one of the kids he’s supposed to be watching during swimming seemingly drowns.
Played by future Ant-Man star Paul Rudd, Andy is characterized in-game as a buff, charming jerk.
…Sounds about right.
Check out his stats below.
GAIL
Gail fell in love, got married, had a breakup, and liberated herself to find love with one of the (underage) campers all in one summer camp session, if our recollection of Wet Hot American Summer and First Day of Camp is to be believed.
Played by Molly Shannon (Saturday Night Live), Gail von Kleinenstein was the camp’s crafts coordinator, and when audiences first met her, she was having a post-breakup meltdown in front of a group of preternaturally mature and thoughtful kids.
Per the game, she’s a smart sweetheart, “good-weird” and a bit of a weakling.
You can check her stats out below.
GENE
If you’ve only seen Wet Hot American Summer once, it’s distinctly possible that Gene is the first character you remember.
A Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Gene was in charge of the camp’s cafeteria. He had two companions in the film: Gary, who helped him in the kitchen, and a talking can of mixed vegetables later revealed to be Mitch, the camp’s previous director.
Gene constantly baffled Gary by revealing his strange behavior and fetishes out loud, and then trying to backtrack and covering himself very poorly when Gary called him out. It was he who made “dick cream” and “humping the fridge” into phrases associated with the movie.
In the game, he’s listed as buff, charming, “good weird” and a jerk — which is fair. Even though he’s a pretty sympathetic character, he did spend most of the movie yelling more or less randomly at Gary.
You can check out his stats below.
KATIE
Characterized in-game as a sweetheart, a charmer, and a weakling, Katie is one of the characters you can play — but whose on-screen representative (Marguerite Moreau) helped craft the game, so she’ll probably outdo you.
Katie is one of the camp counselors at Camp Firewood. Her official boyfriend — Andy — is obnoxious and cheats on her, and she’s got a “nice guy” best friend who spends the last day of camp attempting to win her away from Andy with…mixed results.
According to Coop, who reveals a lot of information about her during his attempts to get her attention, Katie is also bow legged and bilingual.
You can check out her stats below.
NEIL
Neil is arguably the character here we’ve seen the least of onscreen — although Lo Truglio’s involvement with the game and his previous relationship with Devastator means they likely had some strong insight into his character when he was being created.
Essentially the sidekick to Ken Marino’s Victor, we got the sense that Neil was loyal and put-upon, and definitely smarter than Victor, although not quite bright enough to see through his buddy’s nonsense.
In-game, he’s characterized as a smarty, a sweetheart, heroic, but kind of a bummer. Considering that he spent so much of the movie seething with anger but ultimately came through to rescue some drowning campers (unrelated to the aforementioned drowning camper), that seems like it fits.
You can check out his stats below.
MORE INFORMATION
Wet Hot American Summer: Fantasy Camp co-author Lee Keeler will be doing an “Ask Me Anything” Q&A with users on the comedy subreddit on Tuesday, May 16 at 4:30 p.m. ET/1:30 p.m. PT.
You can check out our interview with Keeler and co-author Geoffrey Golden here to learn more about the Kickstarter campaign, and check out our recent write-up of tabletop games you should be backing on Kickstarter (which includes Wet Hot American Summer: Fantasy Camp) here.
This summer, Netflix will follow up on its Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp miniseries with a Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later series, set in 1991 at Camp Firewood as the cast members from the original film reunite a decade later to evaluate their lives, as agreed at the end of the movie.
The Wet Hot American Summer: Fantasy Camp Kickstarter campaign runs through May 17.
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