Ferris Bueller took his Day Off 30 years ago today

Celebrate with a rendition of 'Danke Schoen'

Christopher Hooton
Friday 05 June 2015 16:48 BST
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If you're currently sat behind a desk, be it school or office, consider standing up, walking out, donning a trench coat and heading to a museum, in honour of the fact that Ferris Bueller's Day Off took place 30 years ago this very day.

We know this thanks to a stunningly in-depth investigation by BaseballProspectus.com, which in 2011 managed to track down the exact game Ferris, Sloane and Cameron were watching at Chicago's Wrigley Field (the Cubs vs the Braves, 5 June, 1985) by analysing who was on the field and how they fared in each inning.

It's crazy to think it's been 30 years since the John Hughes movie was released, and it still resonates and is shown in indie cinemas today.

Sure, it might not be as easy to feign illness in 2015, not least because you're more liable to leave a trail of social media (plus dads don't tend to wear trench coats and trilbys anymore, making it harder to emancipate your girl from high school), but that sense of needing to escape, even just to mooch about in town and try and gather some sense of perspective, is still something most of us can relate to.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off followed Hughes' other cult classics The Breakfast Club and Sixteeen Candles and made $70 million at the box office despite having a budget of just $5 million and taking him just six days to write the script.

Let's just hope no-one decides to try and bloody reboot it, that Honda advert was bad enough.

Hughes, who died in 2009, certainly wouldn't have wanted one.

"We thought about a sequel to Ferris Bueller, where he'd be in college or at his first job, and the same kind of things would happen again," he once said.

"But neither of us found a very exciting hook to that. The movie is about a singular time in your life."

Matthew Broderick, who played Ferris, echoed his sentiments saying it was about a specific "lightning flash in your life"

Alan Ruck (Cameron) also concurred, "But just for fun", he added, "I used to think why don't they wait until Matthew and I are in our seventies and do Ferris Bueller Returns and have Cameron be in a nursing home. He doesn't really need to be there, but he just decided his life is over, so he committed himself to a nursing home. And Ferris comes and breaks him out. And they go to, like, a titty bar and all this ridiculous stuff happens. And then, at the end of the movie, Cameron dies."

@christophhooton

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