Director Ivan Reitman remembers the Cold War comedy classic

It was the height of the Cold War. US President Ronald Reagan had been in office for less than six months when a new comedy released on June 26, 1981, made Bill Murray a movie star, the Army "fun," and the conflict along the Iron Curtain a little warmer. Stripes turns 35 on Sunday - old enough to be commander-in-chief. In this RT exclusive, Slovak-born director Ivan Reitman takes us inside the creation of the beloved film and tells us whatever happened to the flame-throwing EM-50 Urban Assault Vehicle.Ivan Reitman: Well it got changed quite a bit. The overall plot remains the same, but I think that was mostly a dope version of the film where I guess the Stripes that we all know is more of an early 1980s-style slacker… two slackers joining the army. Most of the comedy that we wrote for Cheech and Chong ended up in the Elmo character, the Judge Reinhold character. When we had a really good dope-related joke, we gave it to Judge and that seemed to work really well. A little bit of it went to the John Candy character. And the characters that Bill Murray and Harold Ramis play are really their own, newly-conceived.IR: Well to be more accurate, Bill was always hard, yes. The famous story on my first movie, Meatballs, is that he finally said ‘yes’ the day before I started shooting, which was particularly scary considering that I was co-financing a Canadian-made film. I had worked with both those men and with (John) Belushi and Gilda Radner in a show called The National Lampoon Show, which was a comedy revue that I produced off-Broadway, and that's when I first got to know all these extraordinary actors and comedians