July 21: Bohemian Rhapsody
No one really knows what Bohemian rhapsody is about. Freddie Mercury
took the secret to his grave but I suppose the surviving members of
Queen could cough it up one day. As for me, I could care less. I'm just
not a Queen fan. All I know is that Bohemian rhapsody would have slipped
into obscurity had it not been resurrected by Mike Myers and Dana
Carvey in the 1992 movie Wayne's World.
The dude in the back seat later played Tobias Beecher on Oz.
I was 19 when Wayne's World came out. I'd just got back from my first year in college and my brother, who was 14, all but insisted I go see Wayne's World with him. He'd seen it already and he knew that I was a big Alice Cooper fan. He wanted to see my reaction when Alice Cooper started lecturing Wayne and Garth about the history of Milwaukee.
Milwaukee: Algonquin for 'The Good Land.'
Full disclosure: It wasn't really a college I went to my first year. It was a Christian theatre guild school called The Rosebud School of the Arts. I put an Alice Cooper poster on the wall of my room. It offended a few people at the school but they never said anything about it (I guess it wasn't quite as bad as a Hustler pictorial.) Anyway, I had the lead role in a play and, about five minutes before showtime, I suddenly got really sick. I prayed to God and promised to tear down the Alice Cooper poster if he made me well enough to go onstage. I went onstage, things went great, and when I got back home, I ripped up the Alice Cooper poster.
But back to Wayne's World - a movie that is so goofy and watchable that most people overlook how fantastically clever it is. What would normally be a mistake in a standard movie actually shines in Wayne's World. In most movies, product placement annoys me. In Wayne's World, there's fantastic product placement sequence that is so in-your-face that it makes you laugh out loud.
With the sole exception of the first Blues Brothers movie, Wayne's World is probably the best Saturday Night Live inspired movie ever made. Sometimes I watch snippets of it on youtube but I haven't watched the movie, in its entirety, in 20 years. Having said that, I wonder if it's aged well. Young viewers today probably don't know who Alice Cooper is and - in this world of satellite television and youtube and instant gratification - the concept of a small town public access television show might be alien to them.
Growing up in Calgary, our television - for the longest time - had 12 channels. One of them, channel 10, was a local access TV network. My friend and fellow Mount Royal College theatre student, Jim Samuelson, used to have a sketch comedy type show on it (once he paid me the supreme compliment of telling me one of his characters was inspired by something I did in theatre class.)
Whenever I watch Wayne's World snippets, I find myself thinking about Jim and envying the opportunity he had to be on the telly.
Jim is also a pretty fantastic singer and, as such, he might have a deeper appreciation for Bohemian Rhapsody than I.
Bohemian Rhapsody belongs to the 70s. Wayne's World belongs to the 90s. Both of them are pop culture touchstones in a world that, thanks to pervasive and ever-changing technology, is getting smaller and smaller.
That is real life. It's not just fantasy.
The dude in the back seat later played Tobias Beecher on Oz.I was 19 when Wayne's World came out. I'd just got back from my first year in college and my brother, who was 14, all but insisted I go see Wayne's World with him. He'd seen it already and he knew that I was a big Alice Cooper fan. He wanted to see my reaction when Alice Cooper started lecturing Wayne and Garth about the history of Milwaukee.
Milwaukee: Algonquin for 'The Good Land.'Full disclosure: It wasn't really a college I went to my first year. It was a Christian theatre guild school called The Rosebud School of the Arts. I put an Alice Cooper poster on the wall of my room. It offended a few people at the school but they never said anything about it (I guess it wasn't quite as bad as a Hustler pictorial.) Anyway, I had the lead role in a play and, about five minutes before showtime, I suddenly got really sick. I prayed to God and promised to tear down the Alice Cooper poster if he made me well enough to go onstage. I went onstage, things went great, and when I got back home, I ripped up the Alice Cooper poster.
But back to Wayne's World - a movie that is so goofy and watchable that most people overlook how fantastically clever it is. What would normally be a mistake in a standard movie actually shines in Wayne's World. In most movies, product placement annoys me. In Wayne's World, there's fantastic product placement sequence that is so in-your-face that it makes you laugh out loud.
With the sole exception of the first Blues Brothers movie, Wayne's World is probably the best Saturday Night Live inspired movie ever made. Sometimes I watch snippets of it on youtube but I haven't watched the movie, in its entirety, in 20 years. Having said that, I wonder if it's aged well. Young viewers today probably don't know who Alice Cooper is and - in this world of satellite television and youtube and instant gratification - the concept of a small town public access television show might be alien to them.
Growing up in Calgary, our television - for the longest time - had 12 channels. One of them, channel 10, was a local access TV network. My friend and fellow Mount Royal College theatre student, Jim Samuelson, used to have a sketch comedy type show on it (once he paid me the supreme compliment of telling me one of his characters was inspired by something I did in theatre class.)
Whenever I watch Wayne's World snippets, I find myself thinking about Jim and envying the opportunity he had to be on the telly.
Jim is also a pretty fantastic singer and, as such, he might have a deeper appreciation for Bohemian Rhapsody than I.
Bohemian Rhapsody belongs to the 70s. Wayne's World belongs to the 90s. Both of them are pop culture touchstones in a world that, thanks to pervasive and ever-changing technology, is getting smaller and smaller.
That is real life. It's not just fantasy.
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