History Headscratchers / FerrisBuellersDayOff

** Social conditioning to believe in the infallibility and intrinsic nobility of educators so that they don't question the statist conditioning those educators provide, basically.

*** Okay, so ''Sloane'' is guilty of skipping school, since the parent who called her off was a fake. But Rooney never shows any indication that he suspects this after the phone conversation. He gets suspicious when he hears that Sloane might be dating Ferris, but when Ferris himself calls during that conversation he panics and swallows the lie. Having the fancy car show up apparently seals the deal, as he has no idea that Ferris is ''that'' much of a MagnificentBastard. Even the comment he makes to himself ("So ''that's'' how it is in their family") suggests he is really convinced that was her father.

* Why is Rooney constantly treated as an UnintentionallySympathetic DesignatedVillain by the fandom when the whole movie has him relentlessly [[StalkerWithoutACrush stalking]] one of his students on the ''personal'' belief that Ferris was a truant? Lets face it, whether or not you can accept Ferris as TheHero a man willing to flake his job so he can [[StalkerWithACrush follow a student around all day]], [[DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything a young and attractive one at that]] clearly has ''issues''. While he may make a good case of StrawmanHasAPoint his methods are extremely inappropriate and unprofessional to say the least. To a [[ValuesDissonance modern audience]] his behavior would certainly raise eyebrows.

Anything I left out?

** Plus, even if the teams are in a heated rivalry, it's unlikely that someone on the street will beat someone else up just because they're wearing a rival team's jersey.
*** [[http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nhl-puck-daddy/councilman-assaulted-detroit-red-wings-fan-loss-chicago-221701090.html I beg to differ.]]
*** Well, that's that. Hopefully such incidents are the exception and not the rule, given how the comments on the article seem to universally condemn the act.
*** That might be an isolated incident, but at one point in the film, he was ''at a baseball game.'' Wearing an opponent's jersey at a sporting event is pretty much asking for trouble. Remember the San Francisco Giants fan a few years ago who was beaten to near-death in the parking lot after a game at Dodger Stadium?
*** Well, here I was thinking that sports fans could show basic human decency.
*** They do, for the most part. Two years ago, I took my first trip to New York. I was worried about wearing my Philadelphia Flyers jersey, but was told by people in the know that I'd only need to be concerned if the Flyers and Rangers were in a playoff series or something. I wore that jersey all over Times Square and Hell's Kitchen: nobody cared, except for one or two ''"Flyers! Woooo!"'' comments that may or may not have been sarcastic.

*** They may have assumed that Cameron was from out of town and paid him no mind.

5:50 PM: Back at Sloan's house, Ferris kisses Sloan goodbye for the day and runs home.\\

5 PM: The trio go back to Cameron's house, where they try to roll back the mileage and fail.
5:50 PM: Back at Sloan's house, Ferris kisses Sloan goodbye for the day and runs home.

* The phone call scene...Rooney never considered that Ferris might have an accomplice?

* Am I the only one who thinks this story would work better if Ferris were a broke schmo in a trailer park, and not an obviously privileged kid from the suburbs? He lives in a luxurious house (it's no mansion, but it's no trailer, either), has a computer when those were not cheap (and bitches that he didn't get a car), and a cacophony of electronic and musical equipment he did not pay for himself. What do I care that a slightly upper middle class kid can pull the wool over the eyes of the slightly lower upper class? If he lived in a trailer and had to scrape together his own nickels to buy what little he could afford (a shitty Casio keyboard, a cheap boom box, and some swiped telephone technician tools to crack the school's computer from the pay phone down the road), I would adore this character. As it is, and maybe this is just HarsherInHindsight kicking in, he's just a spoiled baby with FirstWorldProblems.
** The character's ''supposed'' to be a jerk. This isn't an uplifting drama about a persecuted individual defying the system, but a farcical comedy - and, more than that, a farcical comedy written by a guy who usually saw things from the adolescent point of view. When you're a teenager, your moral compass isn't quite steady yet due to lack of cognitive development, and it's only natural to see yourself as the underdog and try to justify anything you do. What's more, comedies of the 1980s were jam-packed with smug, selfish, insensitive, borderline sociopathic antiheroes; it was just a sign of the times, and probably [[ValuesDissonance a reflection of the perverse individualist streak running through the popular culture in those days]].
* Alan Ruck as Cameron. WHY?! DawsonCasting is one thing, but choosing a man who is 'almost 30'' to play a character nearly half that age sounds like something a Creator/WilliamCastle or an Creator/EdWood would do.
** Ruck was thin and gawky enough to pull it off. If one didn't know his age beforehand, they would surely have been convinced. Lest we forget, Creator/RachelMcAdams pulled off looking like a teenager in her mid-to-late twenties... and that's just one example.
** Absolutely. I looked up Alan Ruck on IMDB after watching the film for the first time in over ten years not long ago. My initial reaction to his year of birth was "This ''has'' to be a typo."

** The internet as it currently exists wasn't around in the eighties, but to say it didn't exist at all kind of shows your youth. Hacking as a "thing" began in the eighties, and universities and schools were some of the few places that actually probably would have had a modem. The school's computers likely had an external modem that they would have connected to a central ISD system to access and back up records to over the phone line. This actually would have made it even easier for Ferris to hack it... he would have really only needed some information likely written on the side of the modem itself to get in. And there would have been [=BBSes=] that would have told him how to do it.

** Ruck was thin and gawky enough to pull it off. If one didn't know his age beforehand, they would surely have been convinced. Lest we forget, RachelMcAdams pulled off looking like a teenager in her mid-to-late twenties... and that's just one example.

* Aside from RuleOfFunny,why does Ferris wait until nine days of skipping school to hack into the computer to change the number of days he was absent?

** The internet as it currently exists wasn't around in the eighties, but to say it didn't exist at all kind of shows your youth. Hacking as a "thing" began in the eighties, and universities and schools were some of the few places that actually probably would have had a modem. The school's computers likely had an external modem that they would have connected to a central ISD system to access and back up records to over the phone line. This actually would have made it even easier for Ferris to hack it... he would have really only needed some information likely written on the side of the modem itself to get in. And there would have been BBSes that would have told him how to do it.

* How could Ferris use his computer to remotely access and alter his attendance records when the internet doesn't exist yet, and wouldn't a school in the 1980's keep its records on paper?

** Absolutely. I looked up Alan Ruck on IMDB after watching the film for the first time in over ten years not long ago. My initial reaction to his year of birth was "This ''has'' to be a typo."

** The Braves-Cubs game they go to happened June 5, 1985 (which was a Wednsday), which would have been about two weeks from graduation, so it's not like he'd be going to there for much longer.

** Ferris checked the reservation book, and he had to make sure it was someone for a party of three. Abe Frohman had a resveration for three people next to his name - and Abe was with Ferris' father outside the restaurant; we hear Mr Bueller say "Abe" as they get into the taxi.

*** Uh, Ferris didn't start the parade, it was already in progress. In fact, it wasn't even scripted. There just happened to be a parage going on during filming.

*** That might be an isolated incident, but at one point in the film, he was ''at a baseball game.'' Wearing an opponent's jersey at a sporting event is pretty much asking for trouble.

*** Well, that's that. Hopefully such incidents are the exception and not the rule.