Once you’ve experienced the iconic headbanging scene from the beginning of Wayne’s World, it’s impossible to imagine it being done with any other song than Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The tune is so unique and inherently comedic that a replacement could only ever amount to being a failed substitute in comparison. Believe it or not, though, Mike Myers actually had to fight to keep the song in the movie. In fact, the only reason we ended up with it at all was because Myers threatened to quit if they didn’t let him use it.
In an early draft of the script, Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” was suggested for the scene, but as Myers told Vulture in 2024, he landed on “Bohemian Rhapsody” because “It has a strange operatic quality.” He went on to say, “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.’”
Producer and Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels didn’t feel the same way about things, however, and thought that they should use a Guns N’ Roses song instead. Michaels kept slipping the Billboard Hot 100 under Myers’s door to entice him to change his mind, but Myers stood firm, telling him, “I love Guns N’ Roses. I don’t have a joke for Guns N’ Roses.” Refusing to alter his vision, he thought to himself, “Why not go down swinging?” Michaels finally realized he was fighting a losing battle and decided to go with Myers’s choice in the end. “And to Lorne’s credit, he said, ‘The boy has a passion for it. Let’s get his song,’” Myers remembered.
As it turns out, one person who was grateful for Myers’s efforts was Freddie Mercury, according to Queen guitarist Brian May. “I took [the footage] ‘round to Freddie not long before he went, and showed it to him because, you know, you said you wanted to have the approval,” May shared with Myers during a 2020 Wayne’s World panel. “He loved it. He just laughed and laughed. He was very weak, but he just smiled and laughed.”
The movie’s success also saw the song reach number two on the U.S. Billboard charts, after it had only reached number nine when it was first released in 1976. “Cut to, like, five years ago, I went to a casino in Europe,” Myers recalled to Marc Maron in 2014. “And [there] was an escalator to get into the casino [and] somebody put on ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ and…it was eight thousand people in Europe doing the headbanging thing. And I was like, ‘Jesus.’ I mean, that’s crazy.”
The post Lorne Michaels Wanted to Use a Guns N’ Roses Song for the Headbanging Scene in ‘Wayne’s World’ appeared first on VICE.
