“Stripes” is considered by many a 1980s comedy classic (/Film once called it Ivan Reitman’s second best movie), but once the characters complete basic training, the film moves to Italy where our troublemaking heroes cause an international incident by joyriding in the EM-50 Urban Assault Video, at which point the movie suddenly loses all momentum and stops being funny. It just turns into a generic action comedy that leaves Bill Murray and Harold Ramis with little room to riff. And yet the first half of “Stripes” is such a riot that you can almost forgive the movie completely crapping out — that is, if you’re not John Candy.
The brilliant Candy was finally starting to break through as a big-screen comedy star when he appeared as the weight conscious cadet Dewey “Ox” Oxberger. Candy famously did not like mining his girth for easy laughs, and this concern wound 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 ribald set piece finds Murray’s John Winger talking Dewey into grappling with a group of bikini clad babes in a grime-filled ring. Given his size, you expect Dewey to defeat the ladies rather handily, but they surprise him by fighting dirty. He soon finds himself overwhelmed until he gets so fed up that he rips off their bikini tops. Look, it was an R-rated ’80s comedy; boobs were obligatory.
The bit is far too broad and, frankly, dumb to provoke laughter nowadays, but when the film came out audiences hooted and hollered at Dewey’s triumph. Sadly, Candy could not share in their joy.
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John Candy felt embarrassed and abused by the mud wrestling scene
John Candy turns the table on his mud wrestling opponents as Dewey “Ox” Oxberger in Stripes – Columbia Pictures
In Colin Hanks’ new documentary, “John Candy: I Like Me” (which begins streaming on Amazon Prime Video on 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 that he had in the mud,” said former SCTV producer Andrew Alexander.
Dave Thomas, Candy’s friend and fellow SCTV alum, played the emcee of the bout and remembers Candy not wanting to do the scene at all. “It was like, John take off your shirt and roll around in the mud with a bunch strippers,” said Thomas. “John wore a long-sleeve T-shirt top, because he wouldn’t go completely bare-chested.”
Bill Murray recalls the women also getting too rough with Candy. “The women got into it,” he said. “They were all fit. They started pulling his ears and stuff. People would take a little advantage because they’d think you could do what you want to hurt him. [They’d think that] he’s so big, I couldn’t possibly hurt him. He didn’t like that, he didn’t enjoy that. I understood that.”
Candy was such a kind, generous person that some people might’ve felt they could go anywhere with him for a laugh. As Hanks’ documentary amply demonstrates, this simply wasn’t the case. Obviously, there were many beloved films that he enjoyed making, but “Stripes” was not one of them.
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