Wayne’s world

Party time! Excellent!!

I love Wayne’s world (Yes way!)

It’s one of those films that I saw in the movie theaters as a kid and it got me into going out to see movies in the theater. It was just a good experience overall.

I remember being home from school and my mom calls me stating she needed to meet me at her job to giver her something. I can’t recall why I was not at school if she was at work in the middle of the day, my only explanation was that since it was a cold February day that I was home celebrating Presidents day, a way better holiday when I was a child because at the time we celebrated both Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthday as two separate holidays instead of one, which met two three day weekends in a row (Yes Way!).

For helping her out, my mom gave me money to hang out at the mall near her job. The mall was a big deal as it was the 1st one like it in my section of the Bronx which would become a hangout spot for teens including myself in a few years. the mall also had a multiplex which was also a big deal. The two nearest theaters in my neighborhood were all single screen theaters that had been around for 30 years and felt like it had not been clean in all that time as well. The multiplex also had matinee prices if you went to the movies during the afternoon (Then I guess they started to loose money and changed it to the 1st showing was at half price).

So I saw Wayne’s world in a high tech multiplex in my own neighborhood which would set the staple for me going to see movies after school and Saturday afternoon in  a place only a 20min walk from my house, which was real cool.

Well speaking of the movie. I was excited to see the film. I watched Saturday night live as a kid. Technically I watched the show because I was a kid and on Saturdays I got to stay up late and Saturday night light was like a symbol for this (although I do remember the struggle to stay Awake pass the musical guess (and how proud I was of myself when I did), but it just so happens that this era of Saturday night live with Mike Myers, Dana Carvey and a few others was considered one of the best eras, and Wayne’s World was a big part of that.

Two teenagers (played by men in their 30s) from a part of the mid-west most likely to be in close range of wherever those 80s teen comedies are always set ( 80s teen comedy icon, John Huge himself created a fictional town in Illinois to set all his films and I know from the film that Wayne’s World is set in Illinois). They start a cable access show that talks about who makes them horny (swing) and what sucks and what does it, in a dumber way than Beavis and Butt-Head did (Not!).

With such highlights in their cable access careers as getting Aerosmith to come on their show and dreaming of being in Madona’s music video, is no wonder this sketch became the first Saturday Night Live segment to get a movie (And the most successful at that). Bigger and better than the 6-10mins segments on a 90mins show, Wayne Campbell and his co-host Garth get their big break when a network exec played by Rob Lowe happens to check out the show while banging a real hot barely legal local and sees the potential of using it to sell shit to dumb kids. Wayne and Garth get a test of what it’s like to hit the big time, and discover it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

Tia Carrere (Swing) also stars in the movie as Wayne’s’ dream girl Cassandra, an up and coming rock and roll singer. Though Tia Carrere has done stuff before this, but it was Wayne’s world that made her a name to remember. I also loved her performance of Ballroom Blitz, a highlight of the film for me(Far more than the Bohemian Rhapsody bit the movie is most famous for)

I also remember Wayne saying the word Shit in the film. It’s seems like nothing now, but it was shocking to me, not because I was a little kid (Who started and ended his sentences with Fuck and had a few Fucks in-between), but because it was a PG-13 film. The only other time I herd the word Shit it a PG-13 film was in Transformers: The Movie which also shocked the Shit out of me.

A shit here and there in a PG-13 movie means nothing now, superhero and role model Spider-Man said shit in the last Captain America movie. Wolverine gets to say shit at least once in every X-Men movie. He also gets to say Fuck once in these movies too. Just once, even in the movies labeled PG-13, cause he’s Wolverine and he’s bad as fuck, but you get what I mean. As the word fuck is considered Rated R material to this day until Wolverine got away with saying it once in Days of Future Past and he gets to say it once in every movie now.

Well like most films based on Sketches on TV shows and acted by comedians on those TV shows, Wayne’s world could be divided as sketch upon sketch. Watching just a lone Segment is funny onto itself. May I suggest the part when Rob Lowe is telling the boys that they are going to have a sponsor, and Wayne and Garth put their foot down saying they will not be sponsored while visually endorsing everything from pizza hunt to Advil. It’s a moment in the movie that put Wayne’s World on the map as they parodied a ton of pop culture references in that moment.

Wayne’s World is also strangely in-depth if you think about it . It’s technically impossible not to be. After all, he started out a 6min sketch on TV and became a 90min movie. The very fact that we can now see were the forth wall is and who is behind the Camera (Like Lee Tergesen who  I remember for being Chett Donnelly in the TV adaption of the movie weird Science more than I remember him being in this film). The forth wall adds depth to the whole persona of Wayne Campbell.

But despite seeing the forth wall, Wayne was still breaking it. When the fictional TV cameras were off Wayne was still on speaking to us though the movie camera  giving us a look at his life outside the TV show, pretty much showing us that he is the same guy on and off the camera, a laid back teen who does not go to college, plays hockey, lives with his mom, and hangs out with his friends. The number one friend being Garth Algar, his co-host who was also given the privileged of talking directly into the camera, even steeling it away whenever he wanted to get private with the viewers (Married…With Children and future Modern Family star Ed O’Neil was in the movie as a war vet turned donuts shop manager who did not realize that the camera privileges were only for Wayne and Garth).

I left the theater totally amazed at what I saw. I had seen the Sketch before the movie, but now when I would see it on Saturday Night Live, I was totally paying attention. I think everyone felt like this, cause you were hearing everyone using the same lingo from the movie, especially Not! that was the longest lasting. People were even parodying the sketch because of the movie. Like on the TV show Step By Step, one of the main characters, JT had his own show JT’s world, which went so far in one episode  as to literally take the plot of the Wayne’s World movie and use it (yes way!)

After this I became a big fan of Saturday Night live poking fun at local cable access. Like with Chris Rocks run with his two sketches I’m Chillin, about a dude who host his show from his home in the projects (and the sketch was a little off with White Boy Chris Farley as his sidekick, but still funny), and Nat X who was a angry brother trying the fight the system and get away from the black man cam (a camera with jail bars on it) which afterwards he would tell us how scared it made him. Or When Cheri O’Terri played a drugged up porn star with her own sleazy cable access show (one of my favorites as this bit is fully based on an actual pron star with her own cable access show in New York), and mad props to Jimmy Fallon’s run, but instead of cable access, he was up with the times with a show that he streamed online that featured his girlfriend and best friend (always played by Horatio Sanz who should never work with Fallon cause the two can’t stop laughing at each other. Than we have the Ladies Man, A sketch so spectacularly done that they felt a movie should be made of it (Which turned out not to be a good idea).

It’s almost a shame. With the success of Wayne’s world, it’s not surprising that Saturday Night live tried a number of times to repeat the formula, with such sketches turned movies as It’s Pat, about a…person whose sex is unknown (this flick may have done better now than back in 1994), the Ladies Man, with Tim Meadows attempting to turn the one character he did on the show into a movie, and A Night at the Roxbury, which was a hilarious sketch about two dudes going clubbing to the tune of “what is love?” that just did not transfer to film. The only one I really liked was Coneheads which came out shortly after Wayne’s world in 1992, but I don’t think did as well. What was it about the magic of Wayne Campbell that made him sooo successful? All I know is, I’m still waiting for that Hanz and Franz movie which I know will be a blockbuster ( and monkeys may fly out of my butt)

Wayne’s world was so big that it spawned a sequel titled Wayne’s World 2, barely a year after the original.  Not that it’s not worth watching, but it’s one of those sequels made to milk the cow dry for money by doing everything the original did but somehow just lacks the magic. I don’t know if that’s the actual Symptoms of a sequel curse, but that’s what’s happening here.

But Let’s stick with the awesomely positive. Wayne’s world is a cultural landmark with comedy and rock and roll that it’s no wonder people are celebrating it’s  25th Anniversary (And it falls on valentines day, how great is that, as it’s a perfect date movie)