Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
"Stay classy, San Diego." Will Ferrell's mustachioed 1970s news anchor Ron Burgundy and his idiot news team gave the 2000s an endlessly quotable comedy — "I love lamp," "60% of the time, it works every time."
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy was released in July 2004, marking the directorial debut of Adam McKay, who co-wrote it with star Will Ferrell and produced it with Judd Apatow. Ferrell played Ron Burgundy, the vain top-rated anchor of a 1970s San Diego news station thrown into chaos by the arrival of an ambitious female co-anchor, Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate).
The supporting news team — Paul Rudd, Steve Carell as the dim-witted Brick Tamland, and David Koechner — turned in a run of absurd one-liners that fans still quote decades later. Made for around $26 million, the film grossed roughly $90 million worldwide; reviews were only mixed at release, but it was steadily reassessed as one of the great modern comedies.
The production shot so much extra material that a whole second movie, Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie, was assembled from unused footage and released direct-to-DVD later in 2004. A proper sequel, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, followed in 2013, but the original's quotability made it a permanent internet-meme fixture.
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