Writer/director Bob Clark gathered material for the movie over a 15 year period. The story is composite of incidents collected from the males of his generation along with some of his own personal memories from growing up in high school.
In 1982, Porky's (1981) was the top movie in the USA for eight weeks and was second only to the sixteen weeks that Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) held the No. #1 box-office spot.
According to the '80s Rewind' website, the studio did not want to make A Christmas Story (1983) but allowed it, so Bob Clark would make the sequel Porky's II: The Next Day (1983).
Bob Clark stated in the 2006 DVD commentary that he used his real-life high school and college experience as the basis for various characters, and compares himself closest to Pee Wee, Billy and Tommy (the brains); others characters were based in real life friends or people he went to school and college with.
The picture was a box-office smash hit despite being generally lambasted by film critics. For example, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert called it one of the worst films of 1982.