YMMV / French Fried Vacation

• Critic-Proof: The third film was lambasted by critics, but sold a whopping 10 million tickets when it was screened in French theaters. It was the highest grossing film at the French box office that year, beating Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest's 6 million (the second place).
• Even Better Sequel: The second film is nigh-unanimously considered as the best, funniest and most memorable of the trilogy.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • It's not uncommon at all to hear people imitating gags from the second film when you go on a vacation in French alpine resorts. Especially when going on a ski lift, with someone whistling or even singing "Quand te reverrai-je, pays merveilleux" like Michel Blanc (Jean-Claude) does when he's stuck a whole day and night on a ski lift.
  • "Sur un malentendu, ça peut marcher" ("on a misunderstanding, that could work"), from the same film, is also used quite frequently in France, usually to qualify something that has zero chance of succeeding.
• Sequel Displacement: The second one (Les Bronzés font du ski) is the most popular by far and is the most likely to pop up in discussions, although the first one is still fairly popular. The third one, while hugely successful in theaters back in 2006, gets the short end of the stick when it comes to quotability. The reason is that its humor has ironically aged poorly when compared to the installments from The '70s due to its desperate attempts to modernize the franchise, and also being part of a trend of poorly conceived and poorly executed French comedies that keeps going since the early 2000s.
• Sequelitis: The third film is nigh-universally considered the worst.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: In the second film, the song Jean-Claude sings while stuck on his ski lift is very obviously intended to be the classic song Étoile des neiges: the copyright owners at the time asked for way more money than expected, forcing Michel Blanc to dub over himself in post with the famous new lyrics.

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