Excellent
Wayne’s World (1992)
From The Smart Set:
In the first locket I owned, I didn’t put in photos of my lover or my mother or my best friend. Not my pets, not my sister. Instead I glued teeny-tiny pictures of Wayne and Garth from the movie Wayne’s World.
The movie was released when I was 13, and my childhood best friend Bridget and I couldn’t get enough. We were already fans of the SNL sketch and then we devoured the film, watching it first in the theaters and then re-watching it on VHS tape, memorizing every line. I named my first pets — two zebra finches — Wayne and Garth. I hung the requisite posters in my bedroom and bought every magazine featuring the pair on the cover. I developed photos I took of the TV screen while watching the movie (where I got those small locket pictures from). The movie’s vernacular became ours; “we’re not worthy” and “NOT” and “excellent” were phrases Bridget and I used on the regular.
We weren’t alone in our obsession. The highest-grossing film ever made from a Saturday Night Live sketch, Wayne’s World had legions of fans and spawned a sequel only a year later. People wore Wayne’s World baseball caps, drank from Wayne’s World mugs, and sported Wayne’s World t-shirts. Everyone loved the movie’s humor, its zany characters, its soundtrack. But I loved it for something else.
