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Today is the 20th anniversary of the classic teen comedy American Pie. Premiering in the middle of the great teen movie boom of 1999, this cultural touchstone morphed into the sleeper hit of the year, earning over $102 million at the box office and spawning three direct sequels and a slew of loosely-related straight-to-DVD spinoffs. Despite the era’s obsession with teen cinema (She’s All That, Varsity Blues, Never Been Kissed, Cruel Intentions, 10 Things I Hate About You, Election, Drive Me Crazy, and Go all premiered the same year), it was American Pie that endured, piercing the zeitgeist with its raunchy humor, stealthy vulnerability, and relatable yet outlandish coming-of-age antics.
American Pie will forever be remembered for Jason Biggs’ sexually curious Jim fucking a pie and Alyson Hannigan’s singsong tales from band camp, but the film’s lasting legacy is that it popularized the now ubiquitous term “MILF.” Four years before Fountains of Wayne introduced us to “Stacy’s Mom,” a seemingly throwaway line from the movie introduced a generation of teens to the term MILF, aka “Mom I’d like to fuck.” During an early scene set at a party at Stifler’s house, Jim and Kevin are admiring a photo of their friend’s mom, who’s memorably portrayed by Jennifer Coolidge.
“I can’t believe a fine woman like this produced a guy like Stifler,” Jim says, before being interrupted by glorified extra and future superstar John Cho. Credited as “MILF Guy #2,” the actor proclaims that Stifler’s mom is a MILF, even providing the audience with the now famous definition of the familiar acronym. Perhaps all the craziness surrounding Y2K led you to forget about this piece of arcane cinematic trivia, but John Cho is the actor who popularized the expression MILF.
I’m a longtime fan of Cho, and I’m not just talking about mainstream hits like Harold & Kumar, Star Trek, and Searching. I’m all about those Cho deep cuts. I watched Off Centre, Kitchen Confidential, Go On, and Selfie live on television, like a true hero.
John Cho is many things. He’s an actor, a director, a trailblazer, and the man who inadvertently introduced MILF to an entire generation.
How does Cho feel about popularizing this infamous term? The actor was asked that very question during a 2015 Reddit AMA.
“Um… apologetic,” Cho wrote. “Listen, the acronym is – I don’t know that we needed it in our cultural vocabulary, but it was there and I was the conduit at that moment in time. It’s funny, and it started my comedy career inadvertently, but my joke answer is that I apologize for all the websites I’ve proliferated upon the world.”
American Pie launched the careers of a bevy of young stars and made an entire generation of teens look at baked goods in a whole new way. But 20 years after the film’s release, any conversation about the movie’s legacy begins with one word: MILF.
