Wayne’s World (1992)

(Second or third viewing, On Cable TV, June 2016) Wayne’s World hit pop culture the summer before my senior high-school year. You can imagine the carnage, and my visible twitching at how “… NOT,” “Sha-wing!” “Baberham Lincoln” and other catchphrases are still embedded deeply in my brain. Not that it’s all bad: I credit Wayne’s World for making “Bohemian Rhapsody” one of my top-ten all-time favourite songs. Still, I hadn’t seen the film in over twenty years, and watching it was as pure a nostalgia experience as I can remember. Even today, I could quote verbatim from some moments, happily banged my head along at the appropriate time and was looking forward to the pronunciation of “mill-e-wah-que”. Still, I had forgotten enough of the film to make it interesting. I didn’t remember so much meta-humour commentary, and it still works most excellently. (Interestingly, though, I’ve been conflating two quotes as “I’m giving you a no-spew guarantee” for the past twenty-some years.) Mike Myers and Dana Carver are very good as the protagonists, while Tia Carrere looks spectacular in her debut role. The meta-humour is playful enough to stay enjoyable today, even despite a few rough edges. (My new nightmare is seeing Wayne’s World remade as a reality-TV mockumentary.) For a film that I may have been tempted to dismiss as a mere source of high-school silliness, Wayne’s World is still remarkably funny today.