Wayne's World

"You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll hurl." Using this as a tag line, Wayne's World was the surprise hit movie of 1992. Starring Mike Myers (1963–) and Dana Carvey (1955–), Wayne's World was a feature-length version of the comic pair's cult Saturday Night Live skit on youth culture. Full of digs at big business and advertisers' quests for profit, Wayne's World was nevertheless a marketing success. Ironically, its young audience readily bought into the film's cynicism about the world of big business and spent $180 million at the box office to prove how cynical they were. With its clever script and inspired casting, Wayne's World is among the best of the many deliberately moronic comedies made in Hollywood in the 1990s.

The simple plot of Wayne's World is based around a public-access cable-TV show hosted by Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar. Goaded to "sell out" by an unscrupulous TV executive played by Rob Lowe (1964–), Wayne and Garth embark on a series of adventures. These include meeting their idol Alice Cooper (1948–), who gives them a short lesson on the history of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. But besides these strange encounters, it is the chemistry between Myers and Carvey that makes the film truly entertaining. Their take on teen language brands everything either "excellent" or "bogus." For a while, even otherwise respectable adults developed the habit of adding an ironic "not" to the end of sentences.

In the early 1990s, Wayne's World became something of a cult movie, triggering spin-offs from T-shirts (see entry under 1910s—Fashion in volume 1) and action figures to video games (see entry under 1970s—Sports and Games in volume 4) and a roller coaster (see entry under 1900s—The Way We Lived in volume 1) called "The Hurler." Wayne's World 2 followed in 1993, but although the audience came back for more, the second film spread the jokes too thinly. Like many popular movies, Wayne's World succeeded because it tapped into the mood of a particular time. But the real significance of Wayne's World is in the way it changed the marketing of teen movies. By aiming directly at its intended audience on its own terms, Wayne's World had fans even before it opened. Wayne's World is also credited with starting the 1990s trend for "dumb" movies such as Dumb and Dumber (1994) and There's Something About Mary (1998).

—Chris Routledge

For More Information

Myers, Mike, and Robin Ruzan. Wayne's World: Extreme Close Up. New York: Cader Books, 1992.