What to Stream: Spike Lee's 'School Daze' Is a Campus Classic

School Daze (1988) Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Instant

The Basics: A feud between two students at the historically black Mission College threatens to upend campus life.
If You Like: National Lampoon’s Animal House, Dear White People, Mo’ Better Blues

Never one to shy away from a challenge, Spike Lee followed up his scrappy, black-and-white indie debut She’s Gotta Have It with a studio-backed, full-color collegiate musical. This being a Lee joint, of course, the characters aren’t singing about sunshine and rainbows or the winds sweeping down the plains. Instead, School Daze is a high-energy, high-volume look at the various fault lines and tensions that exist on historically black university campuses, like Lee’s own alma mater, Morehouse College, which served as the basis for the film’s fictionalized “Mission College.” The actor previously known as Larry Fishburne plays a politically active pupil who gets into regular stare-downs with a frat world superstar (Giancarlo Esposito, who would play a very different character in Lee’s next movie, Do the Right Thing) over issues of race and social responsibility. Lee shoots for the moon in School Daze, packing as many issues, dramatic encounters and musical sequences into the movie as he can on a $6.5 million budget. The result is an early indicator of the effectiveness of Lee’s confrontational style, which has served him both well (Do the Right Thing) and poorly (She Hate Me) over the years. And while the film was received with mixed emotions at the time, it’s since become a college movie staple, one that newer films — like Justin Simien’s much-acclaimed Dear White People — aspire to be compared to. If you’ve seen Simien’s movie, but haven’t gotten around to Lee’s…well, like they say in school, it’s important to know your history.

Watch the trailer:

Photo credit: Everett