Here’s the Iconic ‘Wayne’s World’ Scene That Almost Never Happened

The most rewatched scene in the ‘90s comedy blockbuster Wayne’s World almost never happened, Mike Myers told Vulture recently. Or at the very least, it could have turned out very differently. In Myers’ original script, the movie's opening musical number called for the Mirthmobile passengers to bang their heads to Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” But the studio had a different idea, and it wasn’t the eventual choice, “Bohemian Rhapsody.” 

“They wanted Guns N’ Roses,” Myers said of the world’s most popular rock band in the early 1990s. Myers was a fan but he had a problem: “I just didn’t have anything funny for it.”

Despite no prior experience leading a movie, Myers refused to rock out to Guns N’ Roses. “I was gonna fight,” he said. “I wasn’t gonna be mean, I wasn’t gonna be ugly, but I was not gonna be talked out of my vision because I thought I’d probably only get one turn at bat. Why not go down swinging?”

There would be no head-banging to “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” but Myers did pivot to the Queen classic. “It’s one of the greatest rock songs ever,” Myers explained. “It has a strange operatic quality. I loved Queen, and in our car, we had a Dodge Dart — a light-blue Dodge Dart that had a vomit stain that we chipped into the shape of Elvis. And everybody was assigned a ‘Galileo.’ That was the big thing, and we had fights if you took my ‘Galileo.’”

Myers got his song but didn’t get his way on everything. “My version of it was three times longer, where every bit of it was ‘Is Phil gonna go, is he gonna puke?’ and then it got chopped and chopped and chopped.” Disputes over what Myers wanted and what actually ended up in Wayne’s World is the primary reason director Penelope Spheeris wasn’t asked back for Wayne’s World 2. 

Myers almost didn’t do it either. “I didn’t want to do a second one,” he claimed. That movie also looked very different in an alternate universe, as Myers wrote a screenplay with an entirely different plot. In his original drafts, loosely based on the 1949 comedy Passport to Pimlico, Wayne discovers an old document from the Revolutionary War revealing that Aurora never agreed to be part of America. Wayne uses the opportunity to create the Kingdom of Waynedavia, the first heavy-metal state.

Here’s why you never saw that movie: Paramount failed to secure the rights to Passport to Pimlico. A new leadership team took over the studio during pre-production and instructed Myers to start over on a new screenplay, 10 weeks before filming began.

“I had a choice,” Myers said. “Do I go, ‘Fuck, I don’t want to do it?’ Or do I salvage the jokes that would have worked in the other one and make it about Waynestock, which was going to be the climax of the movie anyways? But I wanted it to be like the Ministry of Being Partied Out, the Department of Being Hassled by Your Parents, a clinic where you’ve got a shitty song stuck in your head, all that stuff. Super, super local.”

Waynes World 2 culminates with a triumphant performance by Aerosmith. Once again, Guns N’ Roses sat on the sidelines.