By Robert Scucci
| Published 43 seconds ago

Growing up in the 90s, you could watch 1984’s Revenge of the Nerds with ease through multiple touch points. If you were fortunate enough to have access to the premium movie channels, you’d catch it in all of its uncensored glory behind your parents’ backs. If you had Comedy Central, you’d bear witness to a stripped-down version that lost the nudity but still got its point across.

These days, Revenge of the Nerds, starring the late, great Robert Carradine, is nowhere to be found. It’s not on streaming, and it’s not available for on-demand purchases or rentals, reportedly because its controversial content makes it less than desirable for modern streaming libraries to showcase.

You can still purchase physical copies of Revenge of the Nerds if it’s missing from your collection, but it’s out of print, with 2018 being the last time it got a release. An average casual viewer who gets the urge to revisit it might not even own a DVD player. Most people no longer do.

On one hand, I understand the sensitivity surrounding that one scene that aged like milk. On the other hand, we live in a world where streaming companies pump out droves of content to cash in on memberships and ad revenue. Heck, Invasion of the Star Creatures goes hard in its careless depiction of Native Americans and remains readily available for modern audiences.

All you really need is a disclaimer at the front of the film stating that “awareness of yesterday’s prejudice and its lasting effects can be enhanced when that prejudice is viewed through the lens of the entertainment that informed it.” Then you let people decide for themselves.

Nobody in their right mind would condone some of the more risqué behavior depicted in Revenge of the Nerds, but its overall messaging is wholesome and empowering in its own twisted way. It’s a film about celebrating your eccentricities and rising above adversity so you can become the fully realized, best version of yourself.

Joke’s On You, It’s Revenge Of The Nerds! 

Revenge of the Nerds is a classic underdog story through and through. When Lewis Skolnick (Robert Carradine) and his best friend Gilbert Lowe (Anthony Edwards) arrive at Adams College, they’re immediately ostracized for being nerds.

When the jocks, led by Stan Gable (Ted McGinley), accidentally burn down their own house thanks to a party trick involving high-proof alcohol, a lighter, and highly combustible curtains, Coach Harris (John Goodman) bullies Dean Ulich (David Wohl) into letting them take over the freshman dorms. Nerds like Lewis, Gilbert, Arnold Poindexter (Timothy Busfield), Harold Wormser (Andrew Cassese), Dudley “Booger” Dawson (Curtis Armstrong), Lamar Latrelle (Larry B. Scott), and Toshiro Takashi (Brian Tochi) are relegated to living in the gymnasium until they can join fraternities that will house them.

The problem is that the nerd stigma is wide in scope, so the gang of misfits winds up securing and renovating their own house to the tune of “One Foot in Front of the Other” by Bone Symphony. Thanks to a loophole discovered by Poindexter, they join an all-Black fraternity known as Lambda, Lambda, Lambda, or the Tri-Lambs, on a probationary basis. Despite this progress, they’re still relentlessly bullied, which means they eventually have to stand up for themselves against the Alpha Betas, led by Stan, and the Pi Delta Pis, represented by Stan’s girlfriend, Betty Childs (Julia Montgomery).

At this point in Revenge of the Nerds, it’s game on. To be properly represented by the Greek Council, the nerds need to win the Greek Games, and they might just be smart enough to pull it off. Building toward that triumphant moment, there are panty raids, petty vandalism, and increasingly invasive measures taken in the name of self-preservation, culminating in that one scene.

That One Scene

While most of the antics in Revenge of the Nerds are par for the course in the raunchy R-rated college movie wheelhouse, one scene pushes things too far, and it’s likely the main reason you can’t watch the film online. In it, Lewis plays a prank on Betty that I’ll tastefully refer to as a game of sexual switcheroo. He dresses up in Stan’s costume, approaches her with romantic intent, and succeeds. Betty, initially surprised and understandably upset, ultimately expresses admiration when she learns that all jocks ever think about is sports, while all nerds ever think about is sex.

Don’t get this twisted. It’s a bad scene. It’s deceptive, it objectifies women, and it’s executed in bad faith. However, I don’t think the intention of Revenge of the Nerds was to celebrate that behavior. Like I said earlier, the humor was informed by the cultural zeitgeist that spawned it. To an extent, people acted like this. I’m not glad they did. But if art imitates life, then there’s a kernel of truth in Revenge of the Nerds about the terrible decisions unsupervised young adults can make on a college campus.

Even as a kid, the scene rubbed me the wrong way. It’s not a good look, and it doesn’t do the nerds any favors because it brings them down to the jocks’ level in how they’re depicted as villains. On its own, it’s tasteless. Then you remember that just a few scenes earlier, the nerds rigged the Pi Delta Pi house with video cameras to spy on them and snap nude photos that end up lining the pie tins they sell at the Greek Games, which is also in poor taste, but again, a product of its time, like Porky’s, which we still have digital access to.

Reprehensible, But A Product Of Its Time

No well-adjusted adult celebrates Revenge of the Nerds for those scenes specifically, but they happened, and they exist. They’re hard to watch, yes, but isn’t it also a good thing that we’ve come far enough as a society to recognize the errors of our ways? It’s a conversation worth having about our relationship with media and how older intellectual property can be out of date when it tackles topics like how we treat each other.

If anything, removing “Revenge of the Nerds” from the streaming lexicon does us a disservice, because we lose the context that allows these conversations to happen. It’s a cinematic benchmark of where we came from, something we can measure against where we are now. Without that benchmark, we’re less likely to bow our heads in shame and say we’ll do better.

For that reason alone, it’s a shame that Robert Carradine’s triumphant movie about overcoming adversity can’t be easily accessed. Some aspects of the film didn’t age well, sure, but its messaging, and that one scene notwithstanding, still lands as positive and empowering by the time the credits roll.

As of this writing, Revenge of the Nerds cannot be streamed or purchased digitally.