YMMV / Wayne's World

• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • It seems like a gag made up for the film, but some music stores actually had "NO STAIRWAY" signs before the movie came out due to the number of people who would test out their guitars with that song.
  • Believe it or not, the "Suck Kut" invented by "Ron Paxton" is actually a parody of a real product called the Flowbee. It was invented in 1988 by Rick Hunt, and the Flowbee, as Wayne so eloquently put it, "certainly does suck."
  • In Del's story, Ozzy Ozbourne won't perform until he gets a brandy glass full of brown M&Ms. This is based loosely on a real thing. Van Halen had in their standard contracts that they had to have a bowl of M&Ms backstage with all of the brown ones removed as a Secret Test of Character to check whether their rider had been followed thoroughly. Good thing they did — the first time they found brown M&M's in the dressing room, the staging had broken through the floor. The clients covered up the eighty thousand dollars worth of damage as David Lee Roth trashing the place in a prima donna temper tantrum at finding the brown M&M's. Roth admitted to a couple grand worth.
  • The Gasworks (where Wayne and Garth first see Crucial Taunt perform in the first film) was an actual heavy metal club. However, it was located in Toronto, Canada rather than Chicago. It closed its doors forever a few months after Wayne's World was released in theaters. This is why it does not appear in the sequel.
• Angst? What Angst?: In the sequel, Wayne gets punched by Cassandra hard enough to require being taken by an ambulance where he's seen with a black eye and broken nose. But in his next scene, his injuries are healed completely and their fight is never mentioned again.
• Awesome Music: Wayne, Garth and their crew singing "Bohemian Rhapsody" while driving. Doubles as a Funny Moment.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The film features several, some of them simply for comedic value and others for other reasons. The encounter with T-1000 is one example (as is a similar scene in 2 with a T. rex).
  • When Benjamin tries to talk to Garth, who's making a robotic hand, Garth acts extremely nervous and eventually tries to pulverize the hand. There's never any explanation for what's going on, and it was originally part of a subplot in which Garth is trying to kill Benjamin.
  • Glenn, the manager of Stan Mikita's Donuts, has a few bizarre and creepy rants. He has nothing to do with the plot, it's just funny.
  • When Wayne and Garth first arrive in Milwaukee, their first impulse is to stage a Shot-for-Shot Remake of the opening sequence to Laverne & Shirley, right down to the "rubber glove on a beer bottle" shot. They then realize they're going to miss the Alice Cooper concert and run off like it never happened.
  • The trope is actually discussed, and lampshaded, when Wayne reveals his big room full of ninjas.
    Garth: What are you going to do with these guys?
    Wayne: Oh nothing really. I just always wanted to open a door to a room where people are being trained like in a James Bond movie.
    Garth: Wicked!
    Wayne: SHYA! (Closes door.)
  • Also, to a lesser extent as Wayne "says what he sees" when trying to come up with a name for Waynestock:
    Wayne: ...an old man fashioning a kayak out of a log...
• The Catchphrase Catches On: An apparent specialty of Mike Myers, the film popularized a number of slang terms and saying, such as "No way!/Way!", "Schwing!", "Exqueeze me?" and "Shyeah right! And monkeys might fly outta my butt!"
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Glenn, the manager of Stan Mikita's Donuts.
• First Installment Wins: Wayne's World 2 had a lot to live up to, and while it wasn't exactly disliked, it never really became as cherished as the first. Funnily enough, in the first movie, Wayne actually talks about this trope in conversation.
  Wayne: It's like Star Trek: The Next Generation — in many ways it's superior, but will never be as recognized as the original.
• Genius Bonus: Cassandra's horrible jungle themed music video in the first movie is a possible reference to Pearl Jam, who reportedly went through the same thing for their song "Even Flow". They were so unhappy with the finished result they prevented its release and swore to not make a music video for their next three albums (until "Do the Evolution" in Yield).
• Harsher in Hindsight: The line "they stand like laboratory rats hitting the feeder bar to get food pellets" in 1992 was just an over the top line to show Vanderhoff as a jerk. With the introduction of Skinner Boxing to game design, this almost literally sums up the philosophy behind how a large number of games are being developed.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Wayne tries to get an Oscar by going hysterical about how he (supposedly) never learned how to read. Somebody accomplished this later on.
  • Mentioned above, Wayne at one point claims that Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was still running in 1992, "will never be as recognized as the original." Nowadays, it's easily just as well-known and beloved. The subsequent shows, on the other hand...
  • Rob Lowe emphasizes the word "literally" while talking to Wayne and Garth.
  • In the first film, Garth uses a homemade taser to get back at an unruly Gasworks patron. The way it's designed, combined with his toolbelt, makes it look oddly similar to Kamen Rider Fourze in the latter's Elek States.
  • In Spring 2021 in France, a man who looks like an older Garth got in trouble for setting an underground restaurant in a property he owns, and confessed in interviews he also took went to a few other underground restaurants, before later explaining he was joking.^note France legally closed all on-site restaurants in October 2020 as an attempt to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, and they still weren't allowed to open at the time. French Wayne's World fans reacted to the news with jokes in the veins of "Party time!" or "What is Garth doing now?", not to mention this act would be in-character for the movie's protagonists.
  • Nowadays Wayne would open a door on people training for an Austin Powers movie.
  • In the second movie Wayne sounds more like an ogre than a leprechaun.
  • During the unhappy ending Mr. Biggg telling Cassandra that her band is talented but now just isn’t the right time. At the time of the film's production that seemed extremely odd. But by the time of the actual release it made perfect sense since grunge had completely killed hair metal almost overnight. Mr. Biggg was spot on! In the mega happy ending signing a hair metal band to a six album deal would've been a business disaster!
• Magnificent Bastard: Benjamin Kane is a crooked, yet friendly, TV executive looking to help Noah's Arcade improve their marketing. Taking notice of public access show Wayne's World, Benjamin manipulates Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar into signing over the rights to their show in return for hefty paychecks, reformatting the show behind their backs to make it more appealing to his sponsor. Setting his sights on singer and Wayne's new girlfriend Cassandra Wong, Benjamin lures Wayne away from her any chance he gets to spend time with her, even taking advantage of a series of tragedies to swoop in and take Cassandra out on a relaxing date at a tropical island in one ending, while gracefully accepting his loss in another with a smile.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Schwing!", "We're not worthy!" and "That's What She Said!"
  • Who has ever listened to "Bohemian Rhapsody" without headbanging during the guitar solo?
  • "No Stairway!", as a reference to music store customers over-frequently attempting to play "Stairway To Heaven" by Led Zeppelin on the showroom floor when trying new guitars.
  • Get-A-Load of This Guy Cam.
  • "This may be the reason why Keith (Richards) cannot be killed by conventional weapons."
  • "I was not aware of that."
  • "If Benjamin were an ice cream flavor, he'd be pralines and dick."
• Older Than They Think:
  • The old "That's what she said!" joke is featured prominently in this movie, which came out over a decade before The Office made it a craze in the 2000s. In fact, the joke dates back at least to the 1920s.
  • The character of Wayne Campbell himself predated the SNL skits — Mike Myers had originated a prototype version to use at parties, and eventually took this to Citytv, as a recurring character on their overnight music video program City Limits. This version made further appearances on MuchMusic (when the channel was a pay service and was basically an evolved form of City Limits) and a show on the CBC, It's Only Rock and Roll.
• Once Original, Now Overdone: The kung fu sequence in the second film may seem obvious and old hat today, but it was surprisingly fresh when it debuted; making fun of Lip Lock and over-the-top martial arts wasn't really done much before that film.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Charlton Heston's memorable cameo as the reminiscing gas station attendant. The whole joke is based on Wayne insisting that they get a good actor even though the part is small.
  • Robert Patrick's cameo as the T-1000.
  • Chris Farley as the surprisingly-informative security guard in the first film.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: Two different video games was created with the license in 1993, but they were both not received well.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Is that Tobias Beecher as one of Wayne and Garth's friends?
  • In 2, one of the nerds backstage at the Aerosmith concert is played by Bob Odenkirk.
• Signature Scene: Everybody remembers the "Bohemian Rhapsody" scene from the first film, to the extent where it was a major contributor to Queen's public rehabilitation among American audiences (along with Freddie Mercury dying just months before the film's release).
• Special Effects Failure: When Wayne and Cassandra are standing on Benjamin's balcony in the first film, it's very obvious that they're standing in front of a backdrop.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The producers were only able to secure the rights to "Stairway To Heaven" for the original theatrical run. This is why the version you hear Wayne playing on DVD or video sounds absolutely nothing like "Stairway".
• Tear Jerker: In-universe - Charlton Heston's performance is so awesome that it reduces Wayne to tears. This scene saw a lot of posting when Heston died, with numerous people saying that Wayne was saying what they wanted to say to Heston at the end: "Thank you."
• Tough Act to Follow: While it followed the very well-received The Blues Brothers as the second film based on Saturday Night Live characters to be released, Wayne's World managed to itself avert the trope. However, it ushered in a string of movies based on hit SNL characters in an attempt to recreate the magic, but they all flopped. Even Wayne's World 2 lives in its predecessor's shadow.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The show's first sponsor is a local arcade. It was only a few years after the film's release that arcades started dying out due to rising competition with home consoles and PC gaming.
  • The state of rock music is set firmly in the early nineties, in the last moments before grunge started to dominate the American rock scene.
  • Likewise the fashions are very late eighties/early nineties, especially Wayne's mullet and Garth's glasses. As with Saved by the Bell, it shows how '80s fashion and culture hung on into the early '90s, with Wayne and Garth's enthusiasm for heavy metal as it was giving way to Grunge.
  • The film's premise is based on cable access shows that have been completely supplanted by YouTube and other online media.
  • The Product Placement scene parodies ad campaigns of its time. The Nuprin brand of ibuprofen stopped being sold in America shortly after the film released. Wayne also quotes Pepsi's then-current slogan, "The choice of a new generation," which had already been replaced by the time the film released. The Grey Poupon scene is also a parody of the then-current commercials. And that's not even getting into the logos of the products that are still around, although Pizza Hut did bring back their most iconic logo in 2019.
  • Downplayed with the scenes that homage Terminator 2: Judgment Day (in the first film) and Jurassic Park (in Wayne's World 2), as both films, while extremely recent releases at the time, remained iconic in the decades to come.
• Values Resonance: While Cassandra is introduced as a Head-Turning Beauty, Wayne and Garth are pretty respectful of her, and her main romantic arc with Wayne as well as a good chunk of the first movie's plot revolves around her finding success in her career, and Wayne supporting her. She's a pretty positive portrait of a female musician in a rather male-centric genre, and well-developed for what could have easily been a one-note fanservice character or Satellite Love Interest in a different movie. As such, she compares favorably to bro-comedy love interests in movies made much later than 1992. Tia Carerre herself said that she was surprised that a non-white love interest was written at all.
  • Wayne and Garth host their show on Public Access TV, but many younger viewers have pointed out that their scrappy underdog aesthetic would easily translate to You Tube or Twitch if they made their show in the 2000's. Even getting sponsored or bought out by a bigger company has resonance, as many YouTubers or Twitch streamers have become successful enough to be sponsored, but viewers sometimes feel something special has been lost.
• Vindicated by History: Wayne's World 2 was initially seen as the typical sequel fodder and largely overshadowed by the first film. However, more recent reviews have found the film to actually be fairly decent, especially in comparison to the many lackluster SNL films that followed. At the very least, many think Wayne's World 2 captured the first film's offbeat humor and mostly avoided Sequelitis.
• Woolseyism: There's two in the French dub.
  • "Party time!" becomes "Méga-teuf!" ("Mega party!"), while "teuf" is a slang translation of a neutral English word. This kind of slang actually fits well the protagonists.
  • The Mirthmobile is refered as "Garthmobile", since leaving "Mirth" untranslated would sound like random gibberish in French, and a literal translation of "Mirth" would be quite unfortunate. It could be translated as "Gaimobile", which French pronounciation would sound exactly as "Gay-Mobile" (French has directly borrowed the word "gay" from English, with the same meaning). Other translations are possible, but they wouldn't sound very good.

---