Happy Gilmore, Adam Sandler’s first film after his 1995 Saturday Night Live exit, ended up being a modern classic and it just turned 25 years old. The comedy about an unlikely golf champion had quite the cast too. Obviously appearances by Bob Barker, Carl Weathers and James Bond’s Jaws, Richard Kiel were notable, but Sandler’s love interest Julie Bowen is now an Emmy winner for her long-running role in Modern Family and still working with him today.
Adam Sandler and Julie Bowen recently reunited for Netflix’s Hubie Halloween, a spooky-season family film that had the pair once again playing falling in love on screen. In both movies Bowen’s initials are V.V. (Happy Gilmore’s Virginia Venit and Hubie’s Violet Valentine). While speaking to Yahoo!, Bowen talked about the reunion:
He still has a lot of the same crew, the same writers, same producers. So it’s not like, ‘Remember so-and-so?’ He’s right there. He’s still there. So it felt like stepping into a little train that’s been going the whole time, and I just got to jump on for a little while.
It’s true! Adam Sandler has kept a lot of the same people around for his movies in the past 25 years, which is just incredible really. He recently teamed up with his co-writer on Happy Gilmore, Tim Herlihy for Hubie Halloween, but the pair have been writing movies together throughout the years, between Mr. Deeds or Pixels. Sure, not all of them were winners, but there’s something unique about the family atmosphere Sandler seems to create around his productions.
Adam Sandler rung in the 25th anniversary of Happy GIlmore with a video on Tuesday thanking fans of the movie as he returned to the golf course to hit another one. Check it:
Christopher McDonald, aka Happy Gilmore’s Shooter McGavin also paid tribute to the anniversary too by sharing a hilarious edit to the above Sandler video. Happy Gilmore also was half of what made Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions possible (the other half of that name is derived from 1995’s Billy Madison). Happy Gilmore’s success really helped launch Sandler into a movie star in his own right. Julie Bowen reminiscence further with these words:
At the time, I just thought ‘No one will ever see this.’ And I couldn’t have been more wrong. But the Bob Barker fight still just really cracks me up every time and just thinking about that day and how nobody was sure how it was going to go. On paper, it sounded like it was going to be funny, but boy, it was funny.
Yeah… I mean, who can forget ‘The price is wrong, bitch’? Absolutely iconic. And just shy of 25 years later, Julie Bowen got to star with Adam Sandler again for a Netflix Halloween movie that scored big among audiences. It was very much a return to form for Sandler after his Oscar buzzy Uncut Gems role and even included Ben Stiller doing a cameo of his Happy Gilmore character. Next up, Sandler is finding more gigs with Netflix, including a basketball movie called Hustle and a space movie called The Spaceman Of Bohemia. Sandler just keeps swinging!
