ET Flashback: Chevy's 'Christmas Vacation'

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Can you believe that National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is over two decades old? The 1989 comedy starring Chevy Chase, Beverly D'Angelo and Randy Quaid has become an annual holiday treat for many along with candy canes and hot chocolate, and we're flashing back to their ET interviews on the set and at the time of the film's release!

"I think there's a lot of humor that comes from the stress and from trying to make a Christmas work, and going back to the more traditional values of Christmas," Randy told ET. "Going out, chopping down the tree, bringing it home, decorating it with homemade ornaments and getting the family together, making the dinner, wrapping the presents -- and then the relatives all show up and then chaos reigns."

On returning to his beloved Clark Griswold character, Chevy explained, "You have to expect to see a well-intended, incurable optimist dad who loves his family and is basically, emotionally a child, trying to relive the fantasy of his own childhood, and who, at the drop of a pin -- no, no, that's not right; drop of a hat, or is it a turn of a dime? -- can just lose it."

Written by John Hughes and also starring Doris Roberts, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, E.G. Marshall, William Hickey, Brian Doyle-Murray, Juliette Lewis and Diane Ladd, Christmas Vacation finds the Griswolds deciding to celebrate the holidays at home – and enduring the onslaught of obnoxious relatives, too many Christmas lights, an exploding turkey, a S.W.A.T. team siege and even a killer squirrel!

"The thing about the Griswolds is they always end up having the experiences that so many other people have," said Beverly, "so I think there's a bit of everybody's Christmas in Christmas Vacation."