Howdy Folks! It’s The Kendog with a fond remembrance of legendary director Ivan Reitman who passed away this week at the too-young age of seventy-five. As a child of the eighties, Reitman and his work was an indelible part of my childhood. His work with such luminaries as John Landis, the late, great Harold Ramis, and Bill Murray were as much a part of my growing up as Star Wars or Steven Spielberg. I won’t go into all of his biographical details here: you can find them all at other sources. I will say that he was one of my doorways into a more adult form of humor. The fact that he managed to insert it successfully into PG movies made his brilliance all the more amazing. Of course, he did his share of R-Rated films, classics such as “National Lampoon’s Animal House” and “Stripes.” But it was “Ghostbusters” that managed to combine legit scares and frat house comedy into a winning combination. At 12 years of age, I was old enough to get the adult humor along with some of the scary stuff. (After all, what other mainstream film would feature a dream sequence in which one of the Ghostbusters gets, ahem, serviced by a female ghost?)

Reitman was also the first director to really realize Arnold Schwarzenegger’s comic chops. Both “Twins” and “Kindergarten Cop” still hold up today because Arnold’s sense of humor and absurdity shines through, and a great deal of that is due to Reitman’s guidance. From all involved, Ivan Reitman was a kind man both on and off screen and his unique brand of humor and filmmaking will be missed. So Sayeth The Kendog! (Below I have clips from some of his best known movies. Feel free to comment below or on my Facebook Page!)