Wayne's World

Wayne’s World

1992

Directed: Penelope Spheeris

Writer: Mike Myers, Bonnie Tuner, and Terry Turner

94 Minutes

Mike Myers feature film debut. Chris Farley’s film debut. Alice Cooper. Stan Mikita’s donuts shop. A gun rack. Game on. And of course, Bohemian Rhapsody.

This film is not a meaningful story of good verse evil or hope overcoming the odds. It’s a bro-mance between Wayne (Mike Myers) and Garth (Dana Carvey). It’s a ridiculous story of two cable-access hosts selling out and realizing a band performance by one of their girlfriends can be linked through satellites, beamed into a limo, and that recording contact could save their show.

But then you have the small jokes.

In the scene above, Wayne and Garth make light of television program hand signals, which they refer to hand jobs. They laugh together. They always laugh together. They make jokes and laugh at them. Together.

This is the entire movie.

Originally, Wayne’s World was a Saturday Night Live sketch and the only spin-off to gross over a 100 million dollars. Therefore, it’s not that absurd to believe this entire movie could be based around one-liners.

And we love them for it.

“Shitty Beetles? Are they any good?”
“They suck”
“Then it’s not just a clever name.”

Again, they laugh together. We laughed with them. That’s why this film is genius. It’s not only the one-line jokes and small jabs at commercialization. These were characters that we enjoyed watching.

The characters were us.

The affect on pop culture says everything. Wayne and Garth brought us “That’s what she said,” and “Party on,” and “…Not!” They were the voice of generation X. They were characters that did what they wanted, listened to good music, and talked about the importance of unimportance.

Interesting fact: Dana Carvey is an accomplished drummer and actually played Garth's solo in the guitar store.

This film needed to be made. It spoke to the pimple-popping teenager drinking in his parent's basement with his friends, playing riffs of Stairway to Heaven, and watching Bill and Ted’s excellence adventure. They needed movie that talked about what they were talking about. They needed Wayne and Garth.

Genius.

And the list continues. Within this movie you have Robert Patrick reprising his role from Terminator 2, a play on foreign films when Wayne speaks Cantonese, Wayne getting a gun rack when he doesn’t own “a gun,” and nods to commercials including Grey Poupon, Doritos, Pizza Hut, Reebok, and Pepsi.

It’s was the small jokes that made this film great.

In the end, Wayne says it best: I once thought I had mono for an entire year. It turned out I was just really bored.

Exactly.