Seth Rogen Celebrates McLovin’s 40th Birthday In Superbad Throwback Image

Seth Rogen celebrates McLovin’s 40th birthday with a Superbad throwback image. Released in 2007, the raunchy comedy Superbad announced the arrival of several figures who would soon become major Hollywood players, including the writing team of Rogen and Evan Goldberg and lead actors Jonah Hill and Michael Cera.

The movie was of course loosely based on the real life adventures of Rogen and Goldberg when they were growing up in Vancouver in the 1990s. Hill and Cera played the movie versions of the two writers, but the comedy hit’s true breakout character was clearly Seth and Evan’s friend Fogell, played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse (who recently starred in Promising Young Woman, a very different movie than Superbad). Thanks to the film’s most memorable gag, involving a fake ID with a very unconvincing name, Fogell would come to be better known by his nickname McLovin – and indeed, actor Mintz-Plasse is to this day probably better known as “McLovin” than by his actual name.

The real Mintz-Plasse is only 31 years old but his Superbad character’s fake ID alter ego officially turned 40 on June 3, 2021, an occasion the internet couldn’t help but commemorate. Rogen himself got in on the festivities by tweeting an image of the famous McLovin fake ID which indeed proves its “owner” was born on June 3, 1981. See Rogen’s tweet in the space below:

Rogen reminds everyone in his tweet that he and co-writer Goldberg not only wrote Superbad about themselves as teenagers, they penned much of it when they literally were teenagers – which perhaps is part of why the movie does such a good job of capturing the experience of adolescents growing up in the waning years of the 20th Century. Of course, not every joke in Superbad has aged as well as the McLovin gag, a fact Rogen himself would surely admit to given his recent remarks about comedians needing to own up to their own past missteps when it comes to creating humor rather than blame “cancel culture.”

Whether Superbad has aged well or poorly in general is of course down to personal taste. There’s no question that the movie was a hit when it came out, grossing $170 million on a budget of just $20 million. There’s also no question that it helped launch some very important careers, with Rogen’s and Hill’s at the top of the list, though both Rogen and Hill have obviously both gone on to do a lot more sophisticated stuff than Superbad (and a lot of stuff that arguably isn’t a lot more sophisticated than what Rogen was writing when he was 14). Raucous coming-of-age comedy itself remains a significant genre of course, with movies like Booksmart and Good Boys arriving in recent years to help keep alive the legacy of Superbad, which itself was a successor to movies like American Graffiti, Dazed and Confused and American Pie.

Source: Seth Rogen/Twitter

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