FEARLESS BULLER'S DAY OFF

FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF (1986)
dir: John Hughes

FEARLESS BULLER'S DAY OFF
MAD # 268, January 1987
w: Dennis Snee
a: Mort Drucker

I could go on all day with what I find wrong with this movie, but I'm not here to editorialize. I'll just try to present the parody objectively.

The movie is about Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick), a high school senior, playing hooky for class again. Tagging along are his best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) and girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara). His sister Jeanie (Jennifer Grey) is upset that he gets so much attention. Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones), the dean of students, is on to him, and vows to prove by the end of the day that Ferris is faking his sickness. Ed's secretary Grace (Edie McClurg) is neutral in all this but remains at his side.

Ferris talks to the audience a lot and at the beginning explains how he feigns sickness. In this, the other students at the school know he's sick, but in the movie they think he really is, as do people outside the school, raising funds and ads for him, in gags without closure. Ed Rooney calls Ferris' mother telling her if he's absent again he'll be left back. Cameron is sick and Ferris convinces him to come along and he impersonates Sloane's father to get her out of school, telling them her grandmother's dead. They drive into Chicago in Cameron's father's Ferrari.

The Twist and Shout poster on the wall refers to how this song features prominently in both this and the Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Back to School. More on that film later.

The three of them look at the city from the Sears Tower and catch a ball game at Wrigley Field. They get into a fancy restaurant by Ferris posing as a wealthy businessman. At the school, Mr. Rooney decides he's going to the Buellers' house to expose Ferris' charade. Ferris is one step ahead, as he's rigged the doorbell to set off a tape recording of him and set up the door to his bedroom to set off ropes and pulleys that move a mannequin under his sheets (they don't show how his mother also checks on him as well).

Ferris goes with Cameron and Sloane to the Chicago Museum of Art and crashes a parade lip-synching Danke Schoen and Twist and Shout. There's a musical number where everybody breaks out dancing and his father sees the parade from his office window. (He doesn't actually see Ferris like here).

Traveling back home, they see the odometer of the car they stole from Cameron's father has more miles than it should, because the parking attendant took it for a joyride. They try to set the odometer back in the garage by running the car in reverse jacked up, so Cameron's father won't know they took it. When their plan doesn't work, Cameron gets angry and kicks the car, causing it to fall off the jack, out the garage window, and into the woods. He decides to take responsibility and stand up to his father.

In another scene they don't show, Jeanie also plans to expose Ferris' stunt, and when she gets home, runs into Mr. Rooney, and not knowing who he is and thinking he might be a masher, kicks him, runs to a safe place, and calls the police. Mr. Rooney also gets scared and runs away, and when the police get there, they see no sign of him and arrest her for making a false claim (There's Hughes bringing in a bit of his Lampoon misogyny). Mrs. Bueller now must pick Jeanie up at the police station. She gets there to find she's hit it off with a juvenile delinquent there (Charlie Sheen). Ferris rushes home to get back before the rest of his family so he can get back in bed and continue to pretend being sick. He gets home and to find Rooney waiting for him and is about to bust him but is saved at the last minute by Jeanie, who still hates Ferris, but hates Rooney even more.

The college Ferris Bueller plans to attend is Grand Lakes University from the far superior Back to School which also came out that summer, and coincidentally had one of the same writers as this parody. It was about Thornton Mellon (Rodney Dangerfield), a rich businessman who never went to college, so he goes with his son Jason (Keith Gordon). His bodyguard is Lou (Burt Young). He starts dating his English professor Diane Turner (Sally Kellerman). The dean at the college is played by Ned Beatty. Edie McClurg is in this too as Thornton's secretary. History teacher Turgeson (Sam Kinison) is the same character as his stand-up persona.