This is an event that I've been looking forward to since last summer. I spotted Virgil wearing a Waynestock t-shirt on the lot a few days after Fabio Frizzi and his band performed a live score to Zombie on the lot, and I asked him when we were going to see Waynestock at the Mahoning. I was just kidding, but he smiled and said that it's in the works for 2025, and that the plan is to have live music before a screening of Wayne's World and Wayne's World 2.
As if the live music and the double feature weren't awesome enough, Razorfly Studios brought out their 1976 AMC Pacer hatchback to the lot which has been built into a screen accurate replica of Garth Algar's car, The Myrthmobile.
Other references to Wayne's World could be found throughout the lot.
The timing of this event was right to bust out the Ozzy prayer candle that I got at the Jones Beach show from his final tour in 2018.
It was used as the centerpiece of Del Preston's Band Rider Contest, where fans were invited to guess the number of brown M&M's in a jar, and to separate the other M&M's by color for each of the bands that played at Waynestock.
The Godzilla-Palooza photo op was modified for the stage where the Waynestock bands played.
Jeremiah Tall is a folk rock artist with a cool vibe. Smother Nature has a mid 90's rock sound that I enjoyed. Lapses is synth rock that's right up my ally and reminded me of playing Out Run in the arcade when I was a kid. Sun Bus had an excellent surf rock set to close out the night of live music.
I enjoyed all of these bands, but there was one band who absolutely stole the show.
Dracula And His Band The Draculas performed an incredible set of horror inspired punk rock. YouTube user koswill414 recorded a bit of their time on stage. I wish I recorded the whole thing.
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| The Palm Beach Post - February 14, 1992 |
I moved to South Florida to live with my dad, stepmother, and stepsister on New Years Day 1992. It was a pretty big deal for me; new home, new state, new school, new everything. One of the first things that I remember the four of us doing as a family was going to see Wayne's World at a movie theater called Cinema N' Drafthouse, which was a hybrid restaurant and movie theater that was very much like the similarly named Cinema And Drafthouse in West Hazleton where we go to see The Amish Comic every year. It was a fun night, and we spent the next several months quoting lines from the movie at each other.
There's nothing quite like a warm night at the Mahoning under a cloudless sky. There's hardly any light pollution in the area, so you can really see a lot of stars on a clear night. Sometimes, the night sky feels like an extension of the film, like this scene with Wayne and Garth laying on the windshield of the Myrthmobile looking up at the stars.
As much as I love Wayne's World, I strongly dislike its sequel. I haven't seen Wayne's World 2 since it was on the new release wall at Blockbuster Video when I was a teenager. I didn't like it the first time I saw it, but I tried to go into this screening with a fresh set of eyes in the hopes that seeing it on the big screen would give me a new perspective and appreciation for it. That didn't happen. If anything, I dislike Wayne's World 2 more today than I did 32 years ago. Most of the humor is a carbon copy of the first film, with the occasional lazy and unfunny movie parodies padding out the runtime.
There's only two things about this movie that I liked, but both of them were pretty much abandoned halfway through the movie. The first is the character of Del Preston who starts off strong, but he quickly gets reduced to a background character in lame skits like the roadie boot camp with Chris Farley's groan-worthy "I've got no place else to go" parody. The second thing this film was the subplot of the record label executives plotting to split Cassandra off from the rest of Crucial Taunt. We see this in a phone conversation between Bobby Cahn and Frankie Sharp and in a conversation between Bobby and Cassandra, but it ends up getting completely overshadowed by the rehashed love triangle schtick that completely wastes the talents of Christopher Walken by casting him in practically the same role as Rob Lowe in the first film.
It's not quite as terrible as Airplane 2 or Caddyshack 2, but there's other way to say it: Wayne's World 2 sucks. Still, it couldn't ruin an incredible Waynestock at the Mahoning Drive-In Theater.
