Did revisions in Caddyshack's storyline made it better? You judge!
Caddyshack is among the few 80's comedy that withstood the test of time. Similar to other numerous National Lampoon-related sitcoms of that time, it introduced a whole new collection of comic lines into the vocabulary of Americans. The writers were Douglas Kenney, Brian Doyle-Murray and Harold Ramis. Kenney also wrote the Animal House in 1978 and is the National Lampoon's founding editor. Unfortunately for him, just a month after Caddyshack was shown, he met a terrible accident in Hawaii and perished.
Ramis said Caddyshack was first supposed to be a narrative about a group made up of caddies; yet, since popular stars were brought in to the film, the caddy story was shelved, except for Danny Noonan, who was played by Michael O'Keefe. He added that another concept was a dark comedy on the subject of American Nazis, while Kenney wanted to make a movie featuring Tibetan Buddhists engaged in a fight with red Chinese people. The differing concepts backs the claim of Mark Canton, the production manager, that he had no idea what Caddyshack was really about.
Ramis felt that at the end of the day, it is really about Danny's search for his role model, and considering his choices, it's not an easy thing to do. He has Ty Webb, played by Chevy Chase, who's a self-involved ladies' man and golfer and the oppressive president of the club Judge Smails, played by Ted Knight, and is Lacey Underall's uncle - Lacy is the resident pin-up girl. What Danny really wants is just to save enough money to afford going to college, but that gets complicated because of the different advice of the people around him. There's also the groundkeeper Carl, played by Bill Murray, and the newest club member AL Czervik, played by Rodney Dangerfield, who plans to convert the exclusive club into a condominium development. More characters and several subplots add chaos.
Brian Doyle-Murray, who's also a co-writer, makes a cameo in the film, appearing as the caddy master character Lou Loomis. He was inspired of the real-life caddy experience he shares with his siblings. He was quoted saying the golf club is its own small community. Just like Danny's family, Murray had 8 siblings and most of them had a stint as a cabbie at Indian Hill Country Club. Bill himself worked as a groundkeeper at Evanston Country Club.
Whatever the original script was, only little made it into the movie. A big portion of it were ad-libbed like the way skits are done at Saturday Night Live.