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Summer Campy: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|''All the counselors hate the waiters,''
''And the lake has alligators,''
''And [[Drill Sergeant Nasty|the head coach wants no sissies]],''
''So he reads to us from something called [[Ulysses]].''
|'''[[Allan Sherman]]'''|''Hello Muddah Hello Faddah (A Letter from Camp)''}}
Summer camps in fiction are usually run like the company from [[Dilbert]]. The enviornment seems to be sentient and out to get you (mosquitos chase you across camp, perfectly timed inconvenient rain, etc.) The food is as bad as cafeteria food. In sports, there's a handful of super-jocks who treat it as [[Serious Business]] and reduce everyone else to terror. Arts and crafts are so boring you want to be back in school. The bathrooms are outhouses that require a full nature hike to reach. The teenage counselors are awesomely stupid and actually take the "camp spirit" and "camp traditions" seriously, often bordering on [[Pointy-Haired Boss]].
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Unlike the [[Boarding School of Horrors]], these places tend to be played for laughs. Compare [[Horrible Camping Trip]]. See [[Fat Camp]] for a more specialized type of summer camp.
{{examples}}▼
▲{{examples}}
== [[Film]] ==
* ''[[Camp Nowhere]]'' is about a gang of kids who will do anything to avoid being sent to summer camp, up to and including their own fake camp.
* The ''[[Meatballs]]'' films are all over this trope.
* Parodied in the film ''[[Wet Hot American Summer]].''
* The 1961 film ''[[The Parent Trap (1961 film)|The Parent Trap]]'' starts out at a semi-utopian version of one of these. Fortunately for the audience, [[It Got Worse]].
* Pugsly and Wednesday are sent to camp against their will in ''[[The Addams Family|Addams Family Values]]''.
* The whole movie ''[[Daddy Day Camp]]''.
* ''[[Friday the 13th (film)|Friday the 13 th]]'' popularized the Summer Camp settings among the [[Slasher
* The 1985 made-for-TV film ''[[Poison Ivy]]'' starred [[Michael J. Fox]] and was set in one of these.
** ''[[Camp Cucamonga]]'' (1990) is another made-for-TV example.
* ''[[Little Darlings]]'' involves two teenage girls making a [[The Bet|bet]] as to which of them will be the first to [[Sex as Rite-
* ''Indian Summer'' has a group of adults returning to the summer camp of their childhoods at the invitation of the camp's retiring director.
* ''[[Camp Rock]]'' is set at a summer music camp.
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** ''Nos jours heureux'' (2006) is a comedy about a group of kids and the adults who try to keep them in line for a whole summer.
** ''C'est pas ma faute!'' (1999): in this one the main character isn't in summer camp but fights against the children who are during his holidays. Summer camp life, though, is still the same.
** ''Scout Toujours...'' (1985): a group of unruly scouts manage to break their crazy scoutmaster's leg just before summer camp, so they end up with a guy who has no experience with children. Of course it's played for laugh and everything works out fine in the end.
** Although most Summer camp movies are comedies, ''La meilleure façon de marcher'' (1976) is the exception. It's a very screwed-up movie about bullying in a closed environment, in which one camp counselor accidentally sees another dress up as a woman and leverages the information to psychologically torture him for months. The children, of course, notice nothing.
== [[Literature]] ==
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== [[Live-Action TV]] ==
* The entire premise of ''[[Salute Your Shorts]].''
* ''[[Psych]]'' combines
* ''Camp Runamuck'', a short-lived '60s sitcom.
* ''Hi-De-Hi'', was a not so short-lived sitcom set in a English holiday camp.
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== [[Magazines]] ==
* ''[[Mad Magazine]]'' has also done this every summer. One old piece from the 70s had a camp where the only medical supplies are aspirin and calamine lotion, so every sick and injured camper goes untreated...until we meet a lucky boy who's "got poison ivy, and a terrible headache from worrying about it." A more recent strip had [[Butt Monkey]] Monroe sent to a camp that made him long for the [[Crapsack World]] back home.
== [[Music]] ==
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* ''[[Peanuts]]'' did this every summer, sometimes with insane specialized camps like Sally's "Beanbag Camp" (where all you do is lie in a beanbag, watch TV, and eat junk food) and even a fundamentalist Bible camp. The biggest example may be when all the gang are filling out applications for not going to camp. Everyone's application is accepted. Except, of course, for Charle's Brown's. He gets the letter saying that since his application has been turned down, "therefore, you are to report to the bus stop at 0800 hours."
** The TV special ''It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown'' takes place at summer camp.
** The feature film ''[[Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown]]'' has the gang attending camp and getting involved in a river raft race against a gang of [[Jerk Jock
* In ''[[Shoe]]'', Skyler got sent off, several summers, to what was supposed to be one of these—except that it was almost always [[Semper Fi|U.S. Marine Corps]] training instead. Skyler is a small bird, barely standing as tall as the '''knees''' of his fellow Marine recruits, and wears [[Nerd Glasses]].
== [[Theatre]] ==
* An obscure example: the off-off-Broadway kids musical ''Everything About Camp (Almost)'' is a [[Troperiffic]] look at everything that can go wrong at camp. In a typical scene, the new kids are sent on a [[Snipe Hunt]], and one of the kids is suspicious. He discovers that not only is he required to go anyway, but he's required to pay for the privilege of going. As with most examples of
== [[Video Games]] ==
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== [[Web Original]] ==
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20131104133357/http://www.homestarrunner.com/tgs11.html One issue] of ''[[Teen Girl Squad]]'' had three of the girls going to "Camp Firstbassawassa", which had recently installed "working toilet paper" ("I'm gonna miss the oak leaves"). Whats-Her-Face's bunkmate turns out to be an emaciated, diabetic raccoon girl, the boys' camp across the lake turns out to be a "Cosplayover Camp" inhabited by nerds like Sci-Fi Greg, and Whats-Her-Face and the Ugly One get killed by a chainsaw-wielding "Maniac in a Speedo!"
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* ''[[The Simpsons]]'' has a darker-than-usual example in Camp Krusty, where the kids are used as slave labor. The tie-in video game ''Escape From Camp Deadly'' featured, among other things, a hide-and-seek game where Bart is Team A and Team B consists of everybody else (that, as well as a very lethal [[Food Fight]]).
** Also Homer and Marge met each other for the first time as kid on two neighbouring summer camps, but because of mistaken identity, didn't realize it until later.
* The entire premise of ''[[Camp Lazlo]],'' where most of the humor comes from the happy-go-lucky main character actually enjoying the place.
* ''[[South Park]]'' has a weight-loss camp where Cartman is the [[Only Sane Man]] who isn't impressed by the dancing mascot and his perky teenage sidekicks. Unusually, the ending suggests that even though the camp is stupidly run, they mean well and should be supported.
** They revisit the trope in a later episode called Crippled Summer. The camp is for handicapped children, a boy cheats at all of the tournament events, and oh yeah, Towelie is employed there.
* Camp [[Meaningful Name|Wannaweep]] in ''[[Kim Possible]]'' is a
** In a later episode we see Camp Wannaweep reopened and is back to it's
* "Flappy Bob's Happy Camp Learnatorium" from ''[[The Fairly
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Settings]]
▲[[Category:Summer Campy]]
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