'Wet Hot American Summer': 7 Things to Know About the New Netflix Series From the Creators

We’re already more than halfway through summer, but there’s still time to head back to camp, right? If not, we’ll make time, because Netflix is reviving the 2001 cult comedy Wet Hot American Summer with an eight-episode prequel series (debuting this Friday). And not only is everyone back from the original — Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, Elizabeth Banks, and many more — but a whole new crop of A-listers are joining in on the cheesy ‘80s camp-comedy fun.

To get you all packed up and ready for another trip to Camp Firewood, Yahoo TV chatted with creators Michael Showalter and David Wain and came away with seven things to know about your next summer TV binge-watch.

1. They knew Netflix was the perfect home for this.

A possible Wet Hot follow-up has been on the minds of Showalter and Wain for a while now. “We’ve been talking about it, and trying to think about how and what we would do, for years and years,” Wain says. “It really clicked in when we realized that what we had on our hands creatively was more than a movie. So we got into this idea of doing a Netflix series, which is kind of that perfect, best-of-both-worlds type of thing.”

Showalter and Wain even went ahead and got the entire original cast onboard before approaching Netflix with the idea for a prequel series, Wain says: “We went in and said, 'Hey, this whole, giant group of people wants to do a show on your network.’ And we were hoping they would say yes, because we really didn’t see it working anywhere else."

2. They decided to make it a prequel — because it’s funnier that way.

The Wet Hot movie took place on the last day of camp during the summer of 1981, an era blissfully untouched by the Internet, social media… or even computers at all, really. And the Netflix series goes back even further, to the first day at Camp Firewood that same summer. "We just thought it was funny, that we were inappropriately old when we did the original movie,” Showalter says. “And now it’s fifteen years later, and we’re even more inappropriately old, and we’re playing younger versions of the characters than we did then.”

Plus, as Wain says, it brings us back to the look and feel of the original movie: “It just seemed like, if we were gonna come back to this thing after 15 years, we wanted to go back to the summer of 1981. That’s the world that we wanted to see… I wanted to go back to those sounds and smells of that particular summer.”

Photos: Check Out More Pics From ‘Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp’

3. We’ll learn more about the Camp Firewood counselors and their backstories.

How did McKinley (Michael Ian Black) and Ben (Bradley Cooper) begin their secret torrid affair? What’s the deal with Gene the fridge-humping chef (Chris Meloni)? And how the heck did H. Jon Benjamin’s voice end up coming out of a can of vegetables?

Making the Wet Hot series a prequel allowed Showalter and Wain to flesh out some of the backstories the movie was only able to hint at. “We liked the idea of explaining some of the crazy things that happened in the movie,” Showalter says. “Like, what is the story behind the talking can of vegetables?” (Right?!)

And Wain promises lots of revelations about our favorite counselors: “You learn how it is that Bradley Cooper and Michael Ian Black hook up, you learn what the real background with Elizabeth Banks is… You learn what the various secrets and backstories of Gene the chef are, and what Gail the camp counselor’s first marriage was all about."

4. It was easier getting the gang back together than you’d think.

When we mentioned that Showalter and Wain managed to get just about every actor from the original cast back, Wain corrected us: "I would cross out 'just about.’” We stand corrected: Literally every main cast member from the Wet Hot movie is treating us to an encore performance this time.

And surprisingly, Showalter tells us it wasn’t that hard to pull off, because he and Wain had already been working on other film and TV projects with a lot of the cast members over the years: “So many of the people that are in Wet Hot are people who we’ve been working with all these years anyway.” (Wain directed Rudd and Poehler in the 2014 film They Came Together, for example.)

They both admit it was a challenge to coordinate everyone’s very busy schedules, but Showalter insists it was “ultimately not that much harder than anything else. Mainly because everyone wanted to do it, and everyone wanted to make it work.”

5. Plenty of other actors wanted to go to Camp Firewood, too.

As we said above, the original Wet Hot cast is joined by a host of newcomers this time, from Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig to “Weird” Al Yankovic (!). Thanks to the movie’s legacy as a cult classic, Wain says, stars were actually approaching them to be a part of the revival. “A lot of people, high-profile and otherwise, did come to us and say, 'Oh, I heard you’re doing this. Can I do something?’ And that was very cool and exciting.”

In the first episode alone, Hamm’s Mad Men co-star John Slattery plays highly respected theater director Claude Dumet, who drops in to helm Susie (Amy Poehler) and Ben’s ambitious camp production, and Lake Bell plays a love interest for Showalter’s goofy camp counselor Coop. Showalter himself even has a new role this time: “I can confirm that I do play Ronald Reagan.”

6. We’ll finally meet those preppy rich kids over at Camp Tigerclaw.

We only got a fleeting glimpse of Camp Firewood’s rivals, the villainous Camp Tigerclaw, in the Wet Hot movie, but this time, we’ll see a lot more of them, starting with The Good Wife alum Josh Charles as snooty ringleader Blake. Wain tells us Charles is “just perfect” in the bad-guy role, adding that Charles “took that role incredibly seriously.”

Showalter says Camp Tigerclaw was inspired by his own camp experience growing up: “I think every camp that you go to, you think you’re the underdog to some other camp. When I went to camp, there was a camp called Camp Emerson. And Camp Emerson seemed to have better facilities… they seemed bigger and better-looking.”

7. Filming was a little less crazy this time… but just as much fun.

Shooting the original Wet Hot movie at a Pennsylvania summer camp was a notorious slog; it rained for 25 of the 28 shooting days. And since they shot the TV series in the middle of winter, Showalter and Wain moved production to a Malibu ranch, meticulously redone to look like the original. That came with its own set of problems, Wain says: “Because it was the middle of winter, it got dark very early every day… And it was very cold.”

Wain adds that the atmosphere on set was a bit different this time; on the movie, they were “mostly young, and crazy, and single,” and now they’re all in their 40s, with families and grown-up responsibilities. “But the vibe was shockingly similar,” he says. “It was just a lot of fun, and very familial, and we were laughing all day long."

Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp premieres Friday, July 31 on Netflix.