Weird Science turns 25

This week, my personal favorite of the great five John Hughes movies about being a teenager in the Eighties (phew! quite a mouthful) turned 25 last Monday. Sadly, Alamo Drafthouse isn’t doing a special screening or anything for it. Last year I managed to take Somara to Sixteen Candles during a Girlie Night. Maybe Weird Science will be featured for a quote-along. I do regret missing the Back to the Future event, Christopher Lloyd showed up! So many questions to ask Rev. Jim, Commander Kruge and Dr. Brown.

Anyway, Weird has a huge place in my heart for multiple reasons:

• Oingo Boingo did the theme song. Sadly, this failed to pan into a big hit and wider popularity for them as it did for Simple Minds.
• The main characters Gary and Wyatt were relatable to any unpopular male growing up in high school then. I wasn’t quite that far down the food chain due to my gypsy status but they were sympathetic types despite their hormonal urges.
• It was set in the Midwest, where I grew up for most of my life. Not the usual, ideal “some place in California,” Hollywood falls back on.
• Against all odds, this movie came to the little two-plex in Hazen, ND (nearby rival town to Beulah) around September/October 1985. I really wanted to see it shortly after it was released but either it wasn’t playing in IL or I didn’t try hard enough. Fortunately, it was a silver lining to the dark cloud regarding my return to North Dakota. I remember seeing it twice in one weekend. It was funny and truthfully, there wasn’t much to do.
• The logo was the inspiration for my short-lived attempt to have my own version of JoeBob’s Monstervision on my website circa 1998-2000. I kept the graphic as shown below. The best animated GIF I’ve ever made with help from Illustrator to extrapolate the word “theater” into the same style as “science.”

It’s the only Hughes’ film I can recall ever “breaking” with reality as the story progresses. The gags in She’s Having a Baby are more like manifestations of Jake’s imagination to amplify what he’s thinking. Definitely caters to a young man’s fantasies although I never found Kelly LeBrock attractive, I was more fond of Molly Ringwald and Terri Nunn.

So the good people who run this site have a 10 question quiz about how well you think you know the movie. I got eight correct, I had a perfect score going until the last two appeared. Let me know what you received via the comments.

While digging around on this story, I recall missing the special screening at Alamo Drafthouse in 2002 when Ilan Mitchell-Smith (Wyatt) was the guest of honor. He was an English doctoral student attending Texas A&M at the time. Ilan then when on to teach at San Angelo State and moved on CSU. I actually met a graduate-school classmate of his one afternoon. She said Ilan used to run a D&D game at A&M and when she first heard his voice at orientation, she knew there was something familiar about him. Lastly, enough years have passed that his students don’t recognize him unless they’ve seen the movie, unlikely these days. I did find the little interview the Austin Chronicle had with him the preceding weekend.

Finally, I must be soft in the head to use a link from Faux News yet here’s a little piece on whatever became of the cast, should you think I’m making things up regarding Ilan Mitchell-Smith. There weren’t any real surprises for me other than Somara saying, “Robert Downey Jr. was in this?” Sadly, there’s no mention of Robert Rusler (the other guy who antagonizes the heroes with Robert) but I remember he was a cast member of Babylon 5 for two seasons as a Starfury pilot, Lt. Keffer. I’m also glad Bill Paxton went on to larger things, he stole the show as the mean, older brother Chet.

Now to dig up the box where I put the DVD or scour Netflix streaming.