The extreme self-awareness owes something to the roots of the film itself, which began as a wildly popular recurring segment on Saturday Night Live, a mainstream institution if there ever was one. Wayne’s World frequently reminds the audience that it knows about the inherent hypocrisy of celebrating integrity and outsidership through a Paramount Pictures adaptation of an SNL skit. In the middle of Wayne and Garth’s tussles with Benjamin over the creative direction of the show, there’s a whole sequence where Wayne looks into the camera and says: “Contract or no, I will not bow to any sponsor” while smiling over Pizza Hut and Doritos. They will have their cake and eat it, too. And they will tell you about it with cake in their mouths. For SNL fans who already knew Wayne’s World as a skit exactly as silly and low-rent as the show Benjamin acquires, the plot confronts the question that hovered over the film: can this work at longer than five minutes? The answer would be an emphatic no every other time producer Lorne Michaels would try it: Coneheads, Stuart Saves His Family, A Night at the Roxbury, Superstar, The Ladies Man. But Spheeris and the screenwriters, Myers and Bonnie and Terry Turner, not only excel at supplying enough quality gags to fill 90 minutes, but sketch out Wayne’s actual world with more care and detail than expected. Their Aurora may be a suburban dead end, but it has character.