Making a hit comedy movie — let alone a hit comedy franchise — can be a bit of a daunting prospect. It’s not too hard to make a film full of cheap laughs that land immediately but don’t linger, as evident by the glut of pleasant but forgettable comedy films that exist out there. It’s a little harder to make something ambitious and ahead of its time though, especially when the sting of initial failure hurts enough to make the decades-later reappraisal a long wait. The most key form of comedy movie alchemy is making a film which is extremely of its time yet continues to not just retain but gain devoted fans for years afterward, enough so that the gags that are dated don’t grate too much, allowing for the more timeless material to shine through.
That pretty much describes “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” to a T. In a lot of ways, the film perfectly encapsulates a number of trends in comedy movies and pop culture that were happening when it was released in 2004: gross-out humor (witness the, ahem, “Battles**ts” scene), gratuitous nudity (including an “Extreme Unrated” cut on the DVD release), a general “X-treme” vibe (which the film both pokes fun at and indulges in), and the inclusion of millennial stoner culture, with the film’s director, Danny Leiner, having just come off of “Dude, Where’s My Car?” Yet writers/creators Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg not only knew they were continuing a long-held comedy tradition with their titular slacker characters — one reaching back to the films of Kevin Smith and Cheech & Chong — but realized that making their heroes Asian-American provided opportunities for the first “Harold & Kumar” movie to incorporate clever social commentary in ways both subtle and in your face.
Despite a cadre of spin-offs and side projects regarding “Harold & Kumar” having been pitched and put into development, the franchise only currently encapsulates three films, with the possibility of “Harold & Kumar 4” still hanging tantalizingly in the air, like a White Castle location you just can’t find. Although the correct order to watch these films is fairly simple, the holiday season may have you deciding to switch things up if you’ve got a serious Christmas cheer craving.