20 Best Sports Comedy Movies Of All Time

"Feel the rhythm! Feel the rhyme. Get on up! It's bobsled time! Cool Runnings!" If you've seen "Cool Runnings," you know this infectious chant and probably recited it in your head as you read the words on screen. If you haven't seen "Cool Runnings," go watch "Cool Runnings." The 1993 sports comedy tells a fictionalized version of the real-life Jamaican bobsled team — as in a group of Winter Olympics competitors from the small, Caribbean island nation where winter temperatures are still around 86 degrees Fahrenheit. When a mishaps in trials costs Jamaican sprinter Derice Bannock (Leon Robinson) a shot at the 1988 Summer Olympics, he recruits the man who accidentally tripped him, Junior Bevil (Rawle D. Lewis), and the other casualty of the fall, Yul Brenner (Malik Yoba), to join his team, along with his best friend, Sanka Coffie, aiming to compete at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. All he needs next is a coach — which he finds in disgraced former American bobsledder Irving "Irv" Blitzer (John Candy) — and an actual bobsled, which comes along later and is dubbed "Cool Runnings."

The film is loosely based on the real-life Jamaican bobsleigh team — the formal spelling — that debuted at Calgary in '88. While the basic premise of the film — a four-man bobsleigh team from Jamaica competing in the '88 Olympics, coached by a former American competitor — is true, the names and backgrounds of the film's central characters were changed. In truth, the idea of a Jamaican bobsleigh team was popular both at home and at the event, rather than being initially derided on both fronts, after being conceived by American businessmen George Fitch and William Maloney, according to jamaicabobsleighteam.com (via archive.org).