At the end of the movie, the camera zooms in to Ferris Bueller's face as he says, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." Those lines have become the mantra for an entire generation of teenagers growing up in the '80s. So when Ferris Bueller's Day Off premiered on 11 June 1986, it not only broke the box office and was a critical success, it told the story of all of our lives. This year, the film turns 40, and its impact on pop culture is far from losing its luster, or it could even be helping us reframe our lives a little more.
When the film opened in 1986, it turned baby-faced Matthew Broderick into a bonafide star. John Hughes, the late iconic director behind all the '80s brat pack films, was said to have written the film with the actor in mind, seeing that he had that perfect combination of charm and wit to pull off the role. Alan Ruck was cast playing Ferris' best friend Cameron Frye, and Mia Sara would be his girlfriend Sloane Peterson.
In just under two hours, we are swept up into Ferris' world, as they dupe and charm their way out of a school day and pretty much going with the flow. Riding a red Ferrari at that. While there are a lot of noteworthy moments in the film, who can forget Broderick atop a float crooning his way through Danke Schoen before breaking into Twist and Shout, or Cameron's misguided attempt to turn back the odometer on his father's car.
While they stayed friends since the film, a Broderick-Ruck reunion finally happened on The Today Show, to talk about the film's 40th anniversary. "I never stopped and thought ‘I’m the coolest teen in America.’ ...I hope I didn’t do that,” said Broderick during the interview on the show. They also pondered about director John Hughes found a way to insert more serious themes, despite the overall levity of the storytelling. "The thing that John was really, really good at was he gave these characters dignity," said Ruck. "...they’re real people, and they’ve got real fears and real desires.’ And he honored all that, and we knew that when we were making it.”
The two actors are also reuniting on the big screen, again playing best friends in the comedy The Best Is Yet To Come, a remake of the French film of the same name, written by Allan Loeb and directed by Jon Turtletaub.
Forty years later, the legacy of Ferris Bueller's Day Off on pop culture is one that lives on. While the film may have defined an entire generation, with every Gen X-er dreaming of their version of one epic day off as he did, millennials and Gen Z-ers still relate to the occasional need for a YOLO kind of day to cope with the myriad of everyday stresses. We don't suggest cutting school though.
