Revisiting Wayne’s World , A Rock’n’Roll Party That Still Feels Familiar

In our new weekly series, we’re revisiting some of our favorite music movies—from artist docs and concert films to biopics and fictional fantasies—that are available to stream or rent digitally. Spoilers ahead.

As a test audience settled in to watch a rough cut of Wayne’s World, the movie’s star and lead writer Mike Myers doubled over in anxiety. “I thought it was awful,” he recalled years later. “I was inconsolable.” The 1992 adaptation of Myers’ popular Saturday Night Live sketch extended his character’s catchphrases and carefree, rock-star-worshipping ethos for 90 minutes. It was the first film spun off from the show since 1980’s The Blues Brothers, and Myers feared it might be the last.

Instead, Wayne’s World was an immediate hit. It remains the highest grossing SNL film by a wide margin, and its key scene single-handedly brought Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” back into the zeitgeist. Almost 30 years later, the movie more or less holds up, with the exception of a few very-’90s pop-culture jokes. More importantly, Wayne’s World still feels real. Myers based the character of Wayne Campbell on the metal-head party kids he tried to fit in with while growing up in Scarborough, Ontario. Dana Carvey based Wayne’s sidekick, Garth Algar, on his geeky little brother who could fix a dryer with a butter knife. If you spent any time in a small town, you understood these characters just by seeing their faces on the poster. “I meet guys like that every day,” Alice Cooper told Rolling Stone regarding his memorable cameo. “They are my audience.”

Wayne’s World plays like its own greatest hits set, a series of nonstop punchlines woven through a winking narrative about two rockers going corporate. Rewatching it for the millionth time, you will likely remember the delivery of every joke. Compact but playfully untethered to plot points, the movie was directed by Penelope Spheeris, who had covered similar subcultures in her previous films: two installments of the defining 1980s rock doc The Decline of Western Civilization and the coming-of-age drama Suburbia. The goal with Wayne’s World, her first comedy, was to keep things light, to accept the characters’ insistence on endless fun as her own operating principle. The story never gets heavy, and when heartbreaks come, someone onscreen usually turns to the camera to hit reset—the narrative equivalent of clearing the way to let a car pass, then diving back into some street hockey action. Game on!

Despite the almost zen positivity running through the film—“Live in the now,” Garth bellows at Wayne as he fantasizes about buying an expensive guitar—the story is full of conflict about authenticity and success. In short: Wayne, unemployed but perpetually stoked, films a goofy public access show from his parents’ basement in Aurora, Illinois, alongside best friend Garth. For reasons that aren’t worth explaining, a power-hungry TV producer (Rob Lowe) wants to sell it to a local arcade, thus fulfilling the duo’s dream of making their show into a career but also diluting their vision with bogus ads, product placement, and a big-budget studio recreation of the humble basement. So while Wayne manages to cash a check and buy his dream guitar, he also confronts a moral quandary: At what cost?

In other words, it’s a classic Gen-X dilemma about selling out versus maintaining integrity, capitalist greed versus genuine passion—equally central to this movie as, say, Reality Bites or You’ve Got Mail. As they navigate this path, Wayne turns to Garth to impart some wisdom: “I mean, Led Zeppelin didn’t write songs that everybody liked. They left that to the Bee Gees.” This anti-populist ethos may have made Kurt Cobain a fan, but you also get the sense that corporate suits like Rob Lowe’s character would get something out of Wayne and Garth’s journey. And they had to—it’s part of why Wayne’s World became a mega-hit, as opposed to a cult classic.

The movie’s mainstream appeal also had something to do with its crowd-pleasing soundtrack. Would a bunch of metal heads in suburban Illinois in the early ’90s really be driving around headbanging to Queen? But Myers remembered the way he and his brother would sing along, part by part, to the operatic epic in their friend’s car. “If ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was big in my house,” he thought, “it was probably big in other people’s houses, too.” His hunch was confirmed when “Bohemian Rhapsody” charted higher stateside than it ever had in the ’70s, reaching No. 2 after the film’s release. With Freddie Mercury’s death just a few months earlier, the scene resonated as an earnest, if unlikely, tribute.

More than the soundtrack or the themes of growing up and selling out, I attribute the movie’s universal appeal to the lovable goofiness of Wayne and Garth’s music fandom, which has none of the esoteric snark of something like High Fidelity. In other words, they weren’t snobs—they even gave the benefit of the doubt to a band called the Shitty Beatles. Maybe you’d never headbanged in your life, but chances are you loved something the way these guys loved hard rock. From Alice Cooper’s monologue about the socialist mayors of Milwaukee, to Garth’s virtuosic drum solo (which Dana Carvey actually played himself), to Wayne’s sudden mastery of Cantonese, many of the jokes have an underwritten imperative: Don’t underestimate the dudes with the long hair and the cut-off tees.

The whole movie delights in twisting expectations this way. As opposed to most misfit leading men, Wayne finds love easily. He almost immediately charms Cassandra (Tia Carrere), the wailing leader of an alt-rock band called Crucial Taunt, while his ex-girlfriend Stacy, played by Twin Peaks’ Lara Flynn Boyle, pines for him with slapstick absurdity. Platonic friendship and romance are both treated lightly, and for an audience I imagine consisted largely of teen boys, it made asserting yourself and showing affection look mostly painless, even fun. One of my favorite exchanges in the film goes like this: Stacy corners Garth while he’s in line for the porta-potties and asks for his advice about Wayne: “Get over it,” Garth tells her. “Go out with somebody else.” She chews on it for a second, as if the thought never occurred to her. Then she nods, looks around, and grabs the first long-haired hunk who passes by.

This is how problems are solved in Wayne’s World, and the movie itself seems like a blast, bashed out among friends in just over a month in the summer of 1991. But the more you learn, the more its creation sounds like a bummer. There was the competitive edge between 29-year-old Myers and 37-year-old Carvey, as the latter was more seasoned as a comedian despite playing the sidekick. There was also an antagonistic relationship between Myers and Spheeris, which resulted in her not directing the (widely maligned but also fun) Wayne’s World sequel. Myers was ambivalent about the finished film, in part, because there had been too many cooks in the kitchen: In addition to Spheeris, SNL head Lorne Michaels had his own ideas (including swapping out “Bohemian Rhapsody” for a Guns N’ Roses song), as did husband-and-wife co-writers Bonnie and Terry Turner.

I recently learned that a scene I’d always interpreted as pure non-sequitur—the one where Garth abruptly slams a hammer against a robotic arm come to life—was a reference to an abandoned plot point where he builds a machine to surreptitiously murder Rob Lowe’s character. It’s telling that in countless rewatches, I never questioned its narrative coherence. I just laughed. This, to me, is the essence of the movie: Even with its wobbly storyline, it all just works within the world of its own making.

I came to Wayne’s World about a decade late. It was a VHS from my dad’s friend Bob—a high school buddy, the Garth to his Wayne. The tape sat near our VCR, unwatched, until I was in fifth grade and found myself bored with a friend. Half the references went over our heads, but we immediately identified with the key points and aesthetics: the lo-fi cable access look that defined the Adult Swim shows we loved, the anachronistic classic rock worship that fueled then-recent movies like School of Rock and bands like the Darkness, the breaking-the-fourth-wall gestures that pulled us into their hijinks. We couldn’t believe it. We were cry-laughing. It seemed to come out of nowhere, a sign of life beamed in from one suburban basement to our own.

Stream Wayne’s World on Hulu, rent on Amazon or iTunes

Further viewing: Wayne’s World 2 (stream on Hulu), School of Rock (watch with HBO subscription)

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Originally Appeared on Pitchfork