“In this newly forming culture, the drugs and personal liberation of the ’60s would be paired with the self-serving materialism of the ’80s, all of which made partying for its own sake—and not as a philosophical adjunct to solving some complicated problem in Southeast Asia—a righteous activity for the pampered young collegian,” Flanagan writes. “Fraternity life was reborn with a vengeance.”

But a closer critical look at Animal House and Hollywood’s portrayals of Greek life before and after it reveals that the groundbreaking film didn’t necessarily bring back or reinvent fraternities. Rather, it splintered the definition of what exactly “fraternity life” was. According to Animal House, there were two kinds of fraternities: the elitist kind that willingly aligned itself with the establishment, and the kind full of kooks who refused to be tamed.

By casting the outsider oddballs of Delta House as heroes, Animal House made the radical declaration that the latter sort was the better sort. Pop culture—and real college kids all over America—followed its lead.

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In pre-Animal House pop culture, fraternities were often shown to be a little bit mischievous, but ultimately harmless. In 1955’s How to Be Very, Very Popular, for example, two female burlesque performers witness a crime, flee the scene, and hide out in a college fraternity house while disguised as two of its brothers. Complete with frat boys, wacky cross-dressing romances, a hypnotized burlesque girl, a 17th-year undergrad, and a money-grubbing college president, the plot of How to Be Very, Very Popular could feasibly be repurposed into one of the latter-day American Pie college sequels. But the boys’ crisply ironed shirts and wide-eyed panic at the prospect of their house mother catching them with a girl are a pretty good giveaway: These fraternity brothers are still considerably square.

Then the 1960s brought real upheaval in America, and much of it started at college campuses. “During this period of student unrest,” Flanagan writes, “the fraternities—long the unquestioned leaders in the area of sabotaging or ignoring the patriarchal control of school administrators—became the exact opposite: representatives of the very status quo the new activists sought to overthrow.”

Some films from the 1970s reflect that suspicion toward the Greek system at large. In 1977, for example, the low-budget Fraternity Row told the story of young pledge Zac Sterling, who goes to college in 1954 and finds himself increasingly disenchanted with fraternity life as older members of his chapter seize control of more and more aspects of his life. He’s appalled when his brothers suddenly, collectively shun a new pledge whose father has been accused of being a communist.

Fraternity Row, as David B. Hinton puts it in 1994’s Celluloid Ivy: Higher Education in the Movies 1960-1990, showed its protagonist trying to change a corrupt system from within, and it “reminded its mid-1970s audiences that the 1960s advances in tolerance were hard-fought gains.” (It also famously depicts one student’s gruesome hazing-related death by choking on raw liver—which was based on the true story of a pledge at USC who died in 1959.)