Remember When: Alice Cooper Discussed Milwaukee’s History in ‘Wayne’s World’

Beyond being a shock-rock icon, singer Alice Cooper has appeared in a few movies. He portrayed the singing waiter in Sextette, the sinister derelict in John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, Freddy Krueger’s father in Freddy’s Dead: Final Nightmare, and starred as Vince Raven in the 1984 movie Monster Dog about the titular rock star who contends with wild dogs stalking his hometown.

The film part for which he is best known is his cameo as himself in director Penelope Spheeris’ 1992 big-screen adaptation of the famed Saturday Night Live sketch Wayne’s World. Mike Myers and Dana Carvey played lovable long-haired metal doofuses Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar, two young Aurora, Illinois, residents who dream of fame and fortune but are stuck hosting a public access TV show in Wayne’s parents’ basement.

Backstage Asses

In the feature-length film version, Wayne and Garth attract the attention of sleazy television producer Benjamin Kane (Rob Lowe), who buys the rights to their show and then tries to move in on rock starlet Cassandra Wong (Tia Carrere), who has started a relationship with Wayne. Kane gets Wayne and Garth all-access passes to Alice Cooper’s show in Milwaukee. The duo ventures backstage after the concert to meet the man himself as he hangs with his bandmates and fans in his private lounge area. But what the pair thinks will be just be a standard rock star exchange gets more cerebral after Wayne lamely asks, “So, do you come to Milwaukee often?”

To which Cooper replies, “Well, I’m a visitor here, but Milwaukee has certainly had its share of visitors. The French missionaries and explorers were coming here as early as the late 1600s to trade with the native Americans.”

The scene is funny because Cooper comes off more like a high school history teacher than a major rock star. From the mid-’80s into the early ‘90s, party hearty pop-metal littered the mainstream landscape with more artists seeking less intellectual subject matter and simply wanting to rock and roll all day and party all night. That reputation extended across all forms of hard rock and metal. So to hear Cooper wax eloquent about history, especially coming from a man known for “beheading” himself onstage, was a great turnaround. It’s also amusing because, in truth, Wayne and Garth are big geeks underneath and want to look as cool as Alice Cooper, who does not worry about usurping people’s expectations of him.

Raunchy Memories

Cooper recalled shooting the scene to Lyndsey Parker of Yahoo! Music in 2020: “As soon as I got there, Mike Myers says you’re an actor. He says, ‘Here’s six pages of dialogue.’ And I said, ‘When are we shooting?’ And he goes, ‘About two hours from now.’ So I memorized about a quarter of it and then just riffed on the rest of it.”

Continued Cooper, “I was just starting to make things up out of nowhere, you know? What you didn’t see on camera was you had Mike and Dana doing everything they could to make me laugh. I picked a spot between them and delivered all the lines in between them. But if you would have heard the outtakes on the ‘we’re not worthy,’ it went on for about seven or eight minutes and it got vile. It just got vile. I guarantee you Mike or [producer] Lorne [Michaels] has them. But if that ever gets out, I’m not in trouble, they are.”

Although the “Bohemian Rhapody” car lip-synching scene is considered the most classic moment in the Wayne’s World movie, this one is equally entertaining.

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