Don Shanahan
Celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2025, Road Trip, the directorial debut of future four-time Academy Award nominee Todd Phillips, arrives for the first time on 4K-UHD disc format. A favorite among collectors, Kino Lorber, partnering with Paramount Pictures, the owner of the defunct DreamWorks SKG live-action film library since 2005, releases Road Trip’s two-disc set on store shelves June 24th. Film Obsessive was granted an advanced copy of the Kino Lorber disc release for this edition of our “Off the Shelf” physical media review series.
THE MOVIE
It is summertime at the multiplexes, and one of the traditional staples of summer cinema used to be a bawdy comedy or two. I say “used to be” because, since the pandemic and the industry’s shift to blockbuster-or-bust theatrical releases, the typical low-to-mid-budget comedy has been relegated to streaming hubs mostly. Underneath that umbrella of summer comedy lies an even more absent subgenre: the R-rated teen sex comedy. Born in the 1980s and 90s, before evolved and wiser sensibilities took over this century, there was a time you could count on at least one censor-pushing movie per summer to become an instant teen and dorm room classic. 25 years ago, that movie was Road Trip, and it was a hell of a time to be alive.
As the title suggests and tagline brags, Road Trip follows a group of friends embarking on “the greatest college tradition of all.” Clueless stoner Breckin Meyer stars as Josh Parker, a struggling philosophy major at the fictional University of Ithaca. He’s one half of a long-distance relationship with his high school sweetheart, Tiffany (You Me Her’s Rachel Blanchard), attending college in Austin, Texas. Insecure yet adorable, Josh has been mailing Tiffany videotaped musical and love letter messages after not hearing from her for several weeks. In a moment of want and weakness, he has a one-night stand with his classmate, Beth (Amy Smart of the Cranked series), that is captured on video and mistakenly mailed to Tiffany in Austin.
Mortified with guilt and motivated by his friends to get some fun out of this pickle, Josh gathers the womanizing alpha male E.L. (teen comedy staple Seann William Scott), the brainy pot expert Rubin (TV regular Paulo Costanzo), and the geek with the car Kyle (DJ Qualls of The New Guy) for a road trip to race the packaged mail arriving to Texas. Meanwhile, their ne’er-do-well older dorm buddy and narrating college tour guide, Barry, played by comedian Tom Green, is enlisted to hold down the fort and cover for any class absence excuses. Coming off of stealing the show as Steve Stiffler in American Pie, snagging Seann William Scott counted as a casting coup for Phillips and company, as well as capitalizing on the MTV shock comedy peak of Tom Green, putting him front and center of all promotional material for the movie.
Naturally, shenanigans of every which way ensue in Road Trip between the coming-of-age travelogue main narrative and Green’s batty bits as the B-plot entertainment back in Ithaca. All of these wild pursuits are a time capsule to a pre-smartphone era where maps, lodging, phone communication, and finding cash to keep going were as improvised and random as the wind beneath their wings. Road Trip is truly a product of its time, where “tasteful” and “refined” are never going to be labels placed on Todd Phillips’ film. As likely cringy as Road Trip has become in a quarter-century since, the movie had its infectious, quotable, and hapless charm back in 2000. It’s a classic case of “You had to be there” to believe what they could get away with in a movie.
Road Trip opened in third place at the box office behind the debuting flop Dinosaur and the mainstay future Oscar winner Gladiator the week before Memorial Day in 2000. It grossed its $15 million budget back the first week before rolling to a domestic take of over $68 million and a worldwide gross of just under $120 million. It landed on home video just before Christmas during the initial boom of the DVD format, where the advantages of skipping scenes and the pause button made Road Trip’s “unrated cut” a modest collector’s hit for its target demographic and growing cult following.
Road Trip was the test-run springboard for director and co-writer Todd Phillips. He would stay at DreamWorks Pictures for 2003’s Old School, which actually grossed less than Road Trip worldwide, even though it would become an even larger cult hit. Once Phillips followed Starsky and Hutch and School for Scoundrels with The Hangover, he was minted in Hollywood for good, becoming an R-rated box office king with that lucrative trilogy and later the billion-dollar Joker. Success at that level is great, but a big part of me misses the hungry and witty low-budget Todd Phillips that made Road Trip and Old School.
THE DISC
The Road Trip disc from Kino Lorber for their “Studio Classics” label stands to be a strong audio and visual upgrade from the 2000 DVD original and the 2013 Blu-ray editions. The picture improvements for resolution and the beefed-up Dolby Vision sound show up the most in the movie’s many vibrant party scenes, where the soundtrack is bumping and the action is crowded and kinetic. Other than that, the Road Trip packaging and menu setups are fairly standard.
Probably the most curious choice for this 4K-UHD release, something that might be a dealbreaker for the cult fan purists, is that only the theatrical R-rated cut is presented in 4K-UHD. The “unrated cut” (a whole whopping one minute longer) is demoted to the accompanying Blu-ray disc. That counts as a surprise, as that’s normally the other way around.
From a special features standpoint, those too only appear on the second Blu-ray disc of the set and not on the main 4K-UHD disc. Retained were the “Ever Been on a Road Trip?” behind-the-scenes featurette, the music video for “Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues” from The Eels, the “Road Kill” collection of deleted scenes, and smattering of trailers (Tropic Thunder, CB4, Wayne’s World 2, Half Baked, Kingpin, The Rundown, and two of its own). While it’s common across many studios and physical media production houses that those older supplemental materials made with lesser camera quality than the feature film don’t get the same restoration treatment, going through that step counts as the extra mile that separates a line of quality among offerings and collectors.
The one new feature brought to the Road Trip disc set is a new audio commentary track, available to run on both discs and cuts of the movie. Joe Ramoni, host of the “Hat’s Off Entertainment” YouTube channel and co-host of “Almost Cult Classics: The Podcast,” stepped up to the recorded microphone for the commentary. Clearly an ardent fan, Ramoni takes the running time to wax poetically and irreverently about the movie and its comedy. He keeps things celebratory and light, as he wades through the rauchy weeds. Scoring this kind of physical media feature gig counts as a nice get for a burgeoning filmmaker and very contemporary content creator like Joe Ramoni. He’s never going to be mistaken for the likes of Leonard Maltin or a Criterion essay, but Joe was the right man for this job. Once again, post-Y2K was a hell of a time to be alive at the movies.
