It’s the Beatles version but the marching band sound is mixed in. Never officially released, although the Beatles version did become a minor hit.
I really like the movie, but I’m really sick of, “Bueller, Bueller…” Just way overused, similar to Office Space quotes
So it was the Ferrari that took you out of the story and not the fact that the entire premise of the movie is impossible to happen?
I was in college the first time I saw it (girlfriend at the time loved the movie) and it left me empty.
I may have been primed to it, but it’s the kind of movie that seemed to try REALLY REALLY HARD to be all deep and meaningful and to have college kids use it to impress girls, but really it was just stupid.
Meh. He’s charmed. Most of us, in high school, if we had the kind of magic aura surrounding us that he has, would get away with whatever we could. He didn’t actively hurt anybody, just played hooky with his friends.
I get the sense that one day he grew up and became less self-centered.
I think I liked it when it first came out but I really don’t care for it much now. I just don’t find any movie from the 80’s funny and i’m actually starting to hate comedy’s from the 90’s now too. This makes me wonder if I will soon start hating comedy’s of recent times in about 10 years.
Do you have a kiss for Daddy?
So THAT’S how it is in their family.
No, it never worked. (Possibly in some very old - prewar - cars from minor makers.) But it’s contrary to the way odos (more specifically, speedometers) work. In a fairly wide range of experience, I’ve never encountered a reversible odometer.
The odometer thing was just the last straw of absurdity. I found the whole movie utterly meh, like an 80s-teeny remake of Catcher in the Rye without any of the thought-provoking parts.
You also would have owed me $25. Driving my 1985 Honda Civic in reverse did indeed make the odometer go backwards.
Not according to this website:
I read the first 2/3 of Catcher in the Rye once. The thought-provoking parts must’ve been in the last 1/3 of the book. Holden Caulfield’s a self-centered jerk who finds fault with everything around him whether or not he has the least bit of understanding about it.
Ferris Bueller is a kid having a fun time playing hooky for a day. I bet most of us did that at least once (probably with minimal consequences), only Ferris probably did it better.
Most of the humor in the movie, IMHO, had to do with the assistant principal’s obsessive attempts to bust Ferris.
And the odometer thing: it was ‘common knowledge’ among my crowd as far back as the 1970s that you couldn’t reverse the odometer by backing up a car.
Since in most cars of the era, you could actually see the odometer wheel move that showed tenths of a mile, you wouldn’t have needed to back up a full 176 yards to verify whether or not this was true: you could back a car up 30 yards in a parking lot and see whether that last number was reversing direction or staying put.
A few of us actually did test it out on our parents’ cars and our first cars, and the number in the tenths column just stayed where it was if you backed the car up a ways. (As evidenced by other comments in this thread, apparently we just had the wrong cars for it though.)
So for me, the notion that Bueller was expecting this to work was (inaccurately, but we’re talking about perceptions here) a “sheesh, doesn’t everybody know it doesn’t?” moment when I was watching the movie back in 1985. But this was towards the end of the movie anyway, and didn’t really undo my enjoyment of the movie as a whole.
Maybe it worked on some cars, but even a simple mechanical odometer could be made to ‘free-wheel’ when run in reverse.
Yes, it was quite realistic for a teenager to attempt it. There are so many more improbabilities in the movie I’m not seeing how this could be the one that ruins it for anyone.
The audience is supposed to realize the odometer stuff was a dumb idea because it was a dumb idea. Ferris is not infallible.
Running the odo backwards does work on many older cars with mechanical speedometers.
When I calibrated the speedo on my 1971 Corvette I removed it from the car and used a drill to run it at 1,000 rpm and then set it to show 60 mph (that’s how GM speedos where designed back then, 1,000 rpm = 60 mph).
Running the speedo like that added a few miles to the odo, so when I was done I reversed the drill and ran the odo back to where it was initially.
I’m going to politely call BS on this. GM in particular had more advanced speedo designs early on, in the 1940s IIRC, that specifically prevented odo rollback using any technique short of disassembly or using a pick to roll the cylinders forward. (They were also the first to implement a rollover flag that dropped when the display rolled over to all zeros, to prevent roll-forward with a drill or similar technique, around 1970.)
Speedometers and odometers are driven from the same cable, through a slip clutch that turns a steady rotation into an angular displacement against a spring. Turning the input cable backwards disengages the clutch, which is why mechanical speedos show no speed indication in reverse. The drive to both the speedo and odo is cut.
A 1940s Jag, maybe. Any prewar car, very possibly. A 1970s major maker? I’m going to need an authoritative cite to counter 40+ years of experience and automotive electronics design that lapped into early digital speedo conversions using the mechanical drive system.
That was well done. He hasn’t changed much in almost 30 years!
If you thought that the movie was trying to be all deep and meaningful, then I can see how you’d dislike it, since it wasn’t deep and meaningful at all. I’m baffled, though, at what led you to think it was trying to be. The only “message” I got was “Bueller likes having fun and goofing off, and is mostly pretty good at it”.
I loved both Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Catcher in the Rye, but they’re enormously different works. The only thing they have in common is a rather self-centered teenage protagonist who takes a trip to a major US city. Holden Caulfield is a lost 16-year-old struggling with death and terrified of growing up. He’s probably clinically depressed, and spends the whole book trying to find some shred of meaning in life while simultaneously despising and savoring everyone and everything around him.
Ferris Bueller, on the other hand, explicitly rejects that kind of endless pondering - he has his life philosophy worked out: have fun while it lasts. Cameron might have more similarities to Holden, but certainly not Ferris.
(Oh, and while I enjoyed the whole book, I’d say the last 3rd probably did contain the most meaningful parts, especially the speech about the museum and the last paragraph. Of course, everyone has different tastes, and I can easily see how Holden could come off as a whiny loser. ;))
My 73 VW Superbeetle’s odometer would go backward in reverse. The odometer’s cable was tied in with the front wheels/axle so you had to actually drive the car in reverse as this was a rear wheel drive car. You couldn’t put it up on blocks and run it to get the odometer to go in reverse.
I was going to comment on that, too. It’s just a fun John Hughes teenage movie. I’ve never heard anyone argue that it was supposed to be deep and meaningful, nor does the movie feel like it’s trying to be deep and meaningful. It’s a fun, teenaged romp, a wish-fulfillment comedy.
As for the odo thing, I didn’t see the movie until I was about 16 or so (I was 11 when the movie originally came out), and I had no idea car odometers generally did not go backwards. It’s not something I had ever thought about and seemed like a perfectly logical train of thought for a teenager. (And, like was said, it didn’t work.)