Wayne's World - Musical Tributes

We've been talking a lot about the idea of soundtracks, and how some films are written after the selection of a music soundtrack, and I'm surprised no one has mentioned Wayne's World yet.

Wayne's World, was originally a Saturday Night Live sketch, but later became two feature films of the same name (Wayne's World 1 and Wayne's World 2). I can't really comment on the SNL sketches as I've never seen them, but the greatest episode featured Wayne and Garth jamming with Aerosmith with Tom Hanks as their roadie. Both of the films feature as some of my favorite comedy movies, due to their pop culture and musical references. Wayne's World takes the spot for rock 'n' roll and heavy metal tribute films, much the same way that Saturday Night Fever took the spotlight for disco.

Both films attack commericalized rock and roll culture, nerds cramping their music, celebrate babes, hurling, going to shows and being part of something 'big'. In Waynes World 1, a TV producer attempts take over their local cable rock show (of the same name) and at the same time steal waynes girlfriend, Wayne's World 2 revisits this when Wayne has a dream that he is going to host a concert called WayneStock with Aerosmith and Pearl Jam, but his girlfriends new producer seems determined to steal her, ruining everything.

I went back to watch Wayne's World 2 the other day, and decided to check out the directors commentary on the DVD, where director Steven Surjik points out several times that they had started with a list of music and wanted to structure the film around it. Most of the music starts in the diagetic form, either played by a band, on the car radio, on TV but is often sustained well after the disappearance of the sound source. Surjik mentions that they ran into a problem where they didn't have any 'tension music', for scenes not inspired by a musical performance.

From an academic point of view Wayne's World interests me in the scope of the representation of sub-culture on screen, and of musical sub-culture, and also the technical questions of diagetic and non-diagetic musical soundtracks and how they are placed in the film.

Del Preston: Woodstock? That was quite a show, man.
Garth: You were at Woodstock?
Wayne: Excellent! What was it like?
Del Preston: It rained all morning, and then it cleared up in the afternoon. And that's it, I almost remembered something else, ...but it's gone.