“Stripes” is considered by many to be a classic of 1980s comedy (/Film once called it Ivan Reitman’s second best film), but once the characters complete their basic training, the film moves to Italy where our troublemaking heroes cause an international incident by wandering into the EM-50 urban assault video, at which point the film suddenly loses all momentum and stops being funny. It just turns into a generic action comedy that leaves little room for Bill Murray and Harold Ramis to riff. And yet the first half of “Stripes” is such a riot that you can almost forgive the movie for completely shitting – that is, if you’re not John Candy.
The brilliant Candy was finally beginning to break through as a big-screen comedy star when he appeared as weight-conscious cadet Dewey “Ox” Oxberger. Candy didn’t like exploiting his girth for easy laughs, and this concern ended up being at the center of his extreme discomfort when he shot the film’s mud wrestling scene. If you’ve never seen “Stripes,” the saucy set piece has Murray’s John Winger convincing Dewey to fight a group of bikini-clad girls in a filth-filled ring. Given his size, you’d expect Dewey to beat the ladies pretty easily, but they surprise him by fighting dirty. He quickly finds himself overwhelmed until he gets so fed up that he rips off their bikini tops. Look, it was an 80s R-rated comedy; breasts were obligatory.
The passage is far too broad and, frankly, stupid to provoke laughter these days, but when the film was released, audiences booed and screamed at Dewey’s triumph. Unfortunately, Candy couldn’t share their joy.
John Candy felt embarrassed and mistreated by the mud wrestling scene
In Colin Hanks’ new documentary, “John Candy: I Like Me” (which begins streaming on Amazon Prime Video October 10, 2025), the stars’ friends and former collaborators recall his disdain for the mud wrestling scene. “He was very upset about ‘Stripes,’ the scene he had in the mud,” said Andrew Alexander, a former SCTV producer.
Candy’s friend and former SCTV alum Dave Thomas played emcee for the fight and remembers Candy didn’t want to do that scene at all. “It was like John taking your shirt off and rolling around in the mud with a bunch of strippers,” Thomas said. “John wore a long-sleeved T-shirt, because he didn’t want to go completely shirtless.”
Bill Murray remembers that women were also too harsh on Candy. “Women got into it,” he says. “They were all in good shape. They started pulling his ears and everything. People would take advantage of that a little bit because they would think you could do whatever you want to hurt him. [They’d think that] he’s so big that I couldn’t hurt him. He didn’t like it, he didn’t like it. I understood that.”
Candy was such a kind and generous person that some people might have thought they could go anywhere with him for a laugh. As Hanks’ documentary amply demonstrates, that simply wasn’t the case. Obviously, he enjoyed directing many beloved films, but “Stripes” wasn’t one of them.
