This May Explain Why It's So Bad......

From what I've heard, NBC had acquired the broadcasting rights to National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (like they did with It's a Wonderful Life, which before then would air any time of the day every day around Christmas, but now it's only once. My source there is Chris Columbus' commentary on the Home Alone DVD), and so NBC, I guess, decided to finance a direct-to-TV sequel as a promotional tie-in, to run the movies back to back at Christmas. Probably sounded like a good idea at the time, but the trouble is that when you make a direct-to-TV sequel to a movie that was produced and released in theaters, chances are it's going to pale in comparison in terms of production value, as TV movies are cheaper to make, and if it's cheap, the networks will go for it. So with a small budget and probably a very demanding time constraint, they had to put the movie together. Apparently this was all shot during summer 2003 so it would be broadcast in December of that year. Now, if production had a bit more time, they might have put more effort into National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation 2 and made it more enjoyable to the viewers.
Here's something else, the FCC was probably on their backs to make it extremely family friendly, unlike the PG-13 predecessor, which was actually very tame compared to the first two Vacation films. I'd say the original was very family friendly, but what does the FCC know? So they had to dumb down the humor so children wouldn't learn anything vulgar.
So there's three contributing factors to why Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure sucks: cheap budget, close time constraints, and bull from the FCC and NBC execs.

Matty Simmons of National Lampoon fame wrote the script, and as far as we know, the first draft might have been really good, but he may have been forced to trim it up here and there and replace any character building with cheap gags. NBC execs are like, "people will be bored. Keep it moving, make it visual, make it funny" and crap. But what I find odd is that even though this is a sequel spin-off of Christmas Vacation and Eddie and Catherine don't have the same two kids, just the one. Why aren't Rocky and Ruby Sue in this? That's puzzling, I must say.

The cast, well, I think Randy Quaid was the only one actually trying, and when he's the best actor in a film, that's REALLY saying something. Plus, I'm not sure how they talked Ed Asner and Eric Idle into doing this. I mean, out of the entire cast, they're the two actors who are probably the most well off and could say no. But, I guess when they signed on, they read the GOOD script before the FCC and NBC execs raped it, and then it was too late to back out. This happens.
Finally, what do networks executives know about making movies and TV shows? They're just fat cats in suits who are told what people like and know absolutely nothing about their work. They're like, "people like shows and movies about *that* so make them about *that* and let me know when you're done." Back in the day, the network execs knew exactly what the people wanted and were quite involved.

There may be no end to this insane trend of making cheap, direct-to-TV and direct-to-video sequels because they're cheap to make, and everybody in the business wants to make a quick buck off something and don't care whether or not it's good. It's sad, I know, but maybe some day we can overcome it.