Good evening everyone and welcome to a rather tragic entry
of The Magical Mystery Blog.
Dearly beloved, we gather around our screens tonight to bid
a fond farewell to the late, great Harold Ramis.
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| comicbook.com |
Harold Ramis was an actor and
director born in 1944 in Chicago, Illinois. He wrote parody plays in college
and was heavily inspired by the famous Marx brothers. In his college years, he freelanced
for the Chicago Tribune and even Playboy. After attending the Washington
University in Wisconsin, he worked in a mental institution in St.Louis for
seven months, and claimed that it prepared him for the madness of Hollywood.
Upon returning to Second City in 1972, he discovered that
Belushi took his place as a comedic king, and became his deadpan foil. Belushi
then led Ramis, Bill Murray, and other Second City performers to New York to
work on the radio program, The National
Lampoon Radio Hour. These actors along with Gilda Radner, Christopher
Guest, and Joe Flaherty went on to perform in The National Lampoon Show, the successor to National Lampoon’s Lemmings; a show similar to Woodstock only
filled with comedic sketches, great music, and Belushi’s best impersonation
of Joe Cocker.
Ramis then went on to become an actor and the head writer of
Second City TV. He declined working
for Saturday Night Live and chose to
work with SCTV for its first three
years. After the three years, Ramis left
SCTV to pursue a film career; his
first project was a script he wrote with National
Lampoon magazine which later became National
Lampoon’s Animal House. It was the highest grossing and raunchiest film of
its time.
Ramis and Murray teamed up and produced some of the greatest
films ever such as Meatballs and five
others. Not only did Ramis write them, but he
propelled Murray to his superstar status. Ramis also co-wrote with Dan Aykroyd
and created Ghostbusters and Ghostsbusters 2. Ramis also created
popular movies such as National Lampoon’s
Vacation, Analyze This, Caddyshack, Analyze That, and other
classics. He also acted in a great deal of his works and other movies like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Stealing Home, Baby Boom, As Good as it Gets,Stripes, and many more.
In 2004, he was inducted into the St.Louis Walk of Fame. The
following year he received the Distinguished Screenwriter Award from the Austin
Film Festival. In 2009, he stated that Ghostbusters
3 would be in theaters by Christmas 2012 – regretfully, this did not occur because
he contracted vasculitis in 2010.
Vasculitis
develops when the immune system goes against veins and arteries. It can
starve organs, cause harmful tissue damage, and can possibly lead to aneurysms.
It left Ramis immobile for a while, but he gained his ability to walk. However,
in 2011 he suffered a relapse from this disease, and ultimately caused his
death on February 24th, 2014.
He died at the tender age of sixty nine as a fantastic
director, an extraordinary writer, a terrific actor, and the grandfather of two
grandchildren. Harold Ramis will go down in cinema history as a man who brought
smiles to our faces by way of his particular style of tongue in cheek pep
talks, sloppiness and improv, and rage, curiosity, and sloth in a high
articulated voice.
Even though he is deceased, we will still call on you Harold
Ramis, to make us laugh
with your Twinkie analogy, to brighten our days with the
crazy antics of Mr. Griswold, and to make us smile by just being you. May
you rest in peace, Mr. Ramis and enjoy the company of your good friends in the
clouds overhead.
