The Academy of Arts & Sciences held a Wayne’s World reunion panel following a screening of the movie last night in LA, with stars Mike Myers and Dana Carvey present to celebrate the film’s 21st anniversary. Joining Myers and Carvey at the panel were Wayne’s World villain Rob Lowe, director Penelope Spheeris, producer (and Academy president) Hawk Koch, and producer Lorne Michaels. Tickets to the event sold out in 90 seconds.
A lot of news outlets have been incorrectly reporting that Myers and Carvey ended a longstanding feud to appear at the panel together last night, but that’s not really the case. Things have been fine between the two for the better part of the last decade, as evidenced by them appearing onstage together as Wayne and Garth at the 2008 MTV Movie Awards. There was no mention of tension between Myers and Carvey, or between Myers and director Penelope Spheeris at that panel. Spheeris told The Hollywood Reporter recently, “We’re all getting too old to be pissed.”
Cast members Brian Doyle-Murray, Lara Flynn Boyle, and Tia Carrere were all present at the event, with Carrere tweeting a photo of herself and writing, “Who’s up for Wayne’s World 3?” That was the only sequel talk at the event as the notion didn’t come up once onstage. Rumors of a third movie being in the works began circulating last year, but nobody in the panel seemed interested in discussing the idea of another sequel.
Instead, the panel focused on funny stories from the making of the movie. The gang talked about how they decided to turn a short sketch into a feature film (Myers, who had never been in a movie or worked on a movie set at the time, asked Lorne Michaels, and Michaels said yes). Rob Lowe told a story about struggling not to laugh during the scene where Garth hammers at a robotic hand, while Myers reminisced about taking driving lessons during filming to be able to drive the Mirthmobile.
Myers, who clashed with Spheeris on set 21 years ago, complimented her Wayne’s World directing job at the panel and said she made the movie better than it was on paper. “There are two scenes I resisted… in my Canadian ‘you can’t change things’ way,” Myers recalled, citing actor Robert Patrick’s cameo as his Terminator 2 character and the scene in which Lara Flynn Boyle runs into a car on her bike. He admitted that he was wrong about the two scenes. “To be honest with you I don’t remember that year at all,” he admitted. “I remember finishing the film, then I remember my dad dying. Then I just remember Dana and I being strapped to the front of a rocket and me putting on 25 pounds eating my way through it.”
Lorne Michaels closed out the event with his infamous “comedians are monkeys” speech, saying: “People want to see the monkeys because they’re funny, and they occasionally jerk off.”
