Adam Sandler finally brings 'Happy Gilmore' back after nearly 3 decades

“Happy Gilmore” was born on the range. When Adam Sandler was a kid growing up in New Hampshire, his father was an avid golfer. He'd often take his son along to hit balls at the driving range. But Sandler was uninterested in the sport, and usually got antsy. “Why don't you bring a friend?” his dad told him. So Sandler took his buddy, Kyle McDonough, a star hockey player who'd later turn professional. “He never played before but he was cracking the ball so far,” Sandler recalls. “So when I started becoming a comedian and me and (Tim) Herlihy were writing stuff and stand-up and talking about movies, I started thinking about a guy who could hit it really big and had a hockey player mentality.”

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“Happy Gilmore,” released in 1996, was Sander and Herlihy’s second movie, following “Billy Madison.” Sandler was just exiting “Saturday Night Live.” Herlihy was Sandler's roommate at New York University and became a lawyer before Sandler got him to stick to writing comedy. (You might remember the “Herlihy Boy” sketch.)

“We had just done our first movie, ‘Billy Madison,’ and we put every idea we ever had for a movie in that movie,” says Herlihy. “So when they said we could do another movie, it was like, ‘What are we going to do this movie about?’” “Happy Gilmore,” released in February 1996, became one of the most beloved comedies of the 90s and codified the hockey-style swing as a mainstay on golf courses. “A hop, skip and a hit,” as Sandler says. The movie also made comic heroes of Bob Barker, Christopher McDonald and Carl Weathers, and made lines like “Are you too good for your home?” plausible things to ask golf balls.

Like most cult comedies, “Happy Gilmore” didn't start out an obvious instant classic, though. “A one-joke ‘Caddyshack’ for the blitzed and jaded,” wrote EW. “To describe Happy’s antics as boorish is putting it mildly,” wrote The New York Times. “’Happy Gilmore’ tells the story of a violent sociopath,” wrote Roger Ebert. He called it “the latest in the dumber and dumbest sweepstakes.”