Life moves pretty fast. Try to cram it all into one day.

September 18, 2022 10:33 AM

Could ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ really be done in one day? We found out. (SLWaPo)
posted by Melismata (47 comments total)

I love that MULTIPLE people were recreating the film that day. I wonder how many Ferris crashers the parade gets each year?
posted by rednikki at 10:47 AM on September 18, 2022 [8 favorites]

The thing that amuses me about this exercise is that it's like this huge deal for the suburban kids to go into the city. I mean, shoot, spread it over two days, take your time.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:08 AM on September 18, 2022 [6 favorites]

That was more enjoyable than I imagined it would be.
posted by davidmsc at 11:40 AM on September 18, 2022

Ferris has aged about as well as the average John Hughes protagonist, but this is like a puzzle box of love letters inside love letters inside love letters, and I'm totally here for that.
posted by box at 11:45 AM on September 18, 2022 [9 favorites]

Next they can try doing the Newhart opening credits commute.
posted by srboisvert at 11:49 AM on September 18, 2022 [9 favorites]

I wonder how many Ferris crashers the parade gets each year?

Only one in this story, I guess?

Really, what surprised me is that it WAS doable. I always figured it totally wasn't.

Love that someone tried/wrote this, though.
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:08 PM on September 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Given real-life time constraints and logistics, we had to make tweaks to fit every activity.

Fair enough.

I drive 20 minutes from my neighborhood, Roscoe Village, to pick up “Sloane” in North Park, then scoop up “Cameron” in Rogers Park by 8:30 a.m.

Oh c'mon. Sloane was all the way up at Glenbrook North High School and any Chicagoan knows that the run into the city from there is pretty much your whole morning by that time. I had to stop reading from that point on.

he also drives the wrong way out of school but yeah, tweaks. Go GBN Spartans!
posted by JoeZydeco at 1:05 PM on September 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

Good to know. I have this summer time story that already has way to many things to cram into that particular summer, but also a few days of here and there of utter mad dash like fitting everything into a day and the next that are still a bit time dilation movie magic near impossible to pull off. FBDO minus the big city is just the "stars align" sort of perfectly almost impossible day that I'm trying to make plausible if nothing more than extremely lucky and fortuitous. It starts rather early, and ends rather late with me being grilled by her parents. But all in all that day is still a a John Hughes movie magic sort of alignment of the planets or something and the rest of the summer has more things than hours impossible.

Yello - Oh Yeah (Official Video) - YouTube

Done just right... could have pulled it off. Hail Eris!
posted by zengargoyle at 1:08 PM on September 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Drive fast, never under estimate a teenager.. You would fail because you are adults.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:12 PM on September 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

One consideration when trying to recreate any past event is that things are just different today--especially traffic. It just take so much longer to get anywhere these days than it did ten or twenty years ago. There is one drive I make that now takes me a good 60 minutes, even if I'm hurrying. When I first started making that drive 25 years ago, I could make it in 20 if I really pushed it and 30 if I was taking my time. You just can't account for historical traffic patterns during historical recreations.
posted by sardonyx at 2:01 PM on September 18, 2022 [13 favorites]

The biggest problem with the timeline is that Ferris spends like two hours fucking around before he even leaves his own house. These folks set off on the mythical journey at 7:30am... no way did Ferris leave his house before 9am!
posted by lefty lucky cat at 2:04 PM on September 18, 2022 [11 favorites]

Between this and recent post-Goddard discussions of how fast you could pull off the "fastest time through the Louvre" in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I've been wondering just how much fun stuff I could realistically stuff into one day in New York. There's a lot of iconic stuff clustered in midtown-- ESB, Library/Bryant Park, MoMA, Rockefeller Center, and then you get the Museum Mile stuff uptown, and... anyway I'm mapping this out and I'm realizing that every town, no matter how big or small, has a Ferris Route. What's yours?
posted by phooky at 2:08 PM on September 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

canonically, your Ferris Route would have the following activities... 1. procure your transportation of choice and pick up a couple friends 2. visit highest publicly-accessible point in the city 3. watch other people working hard, the fools 4. lunch at fancy-schmancy restaurant 5. attend a sporting event 6. take in a museum 7. crash a parade 8. commune with nature by the water/have a breakdown 9. jump in the hot tub 10. destroy your vehicle (optional) and 11. home before dark!
posted by lefty lucky cat at 2:20 PM on September 18, 2022 [15 favorites]

Ferris has aged about as well as the average John Hughes protagonist

I've seen it posited that Ferris Bueller's Day Off is a prequel to American Psycho.
posted by acb at 3:16 PM on September 18, 2022 [14 favorites]

Cameron, it’s a beautiful day, we’ve won our freedom, here's the article, ungated.

A-also: This Reddit Theory About Ferris Bueller’s Day Off Changes Everything
posted by chavenet at 3:36 PM on September 18, 2022 [11 favorites]

Did somebody say 'theory about Ferris Bueller's Day Off'?
posted by box at 3:57 PM on September 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

My Grandma let me take my road test in her red convertible. I felt like Ferris Bueller for one brief, shining hour.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:00 PM on September 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

The thing that amuses me about this exercise is that it's like this huge deal for the suburban kids to go into the city.

It's _always_ a big deal for suburban kids to go into the big, scary city. See: Adventures in Babysitting.
posted by ZeusHumms at 5:30 PM on September 18, 2022 [11 favorites]

See: Adventures in Babysitting.

Seen; came out about 13 months after FBDO, and may be the most John Hughes movie that Hughes didn't actually write or direct.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:52 PM on September 18, 2022 [9 favorites]

Ferris has aged about as well as the average John Hughes protagonist, but this is like a puzzle box of love letters inside love letters inside love letters, and I'm totally here for that.

It was one of those films that I'd thought I'd seen but hadn't actually and had just absorbed through the general culture. I went back and watched it a year or two ago and it's really not very good or funny.
posted by octothorpe at 6:04 PM on September 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

I can't accept that Ferris and his friends are teenagers. Like every other depiction of teenagers in popular culture, they're obviously twenty-somethings.

What I want to know is: Does Hollywood scale up teenage antics because the writers always want to pretend that being a teenager is much more mature and awesome than it really is (or bragging that their own personal teen years were), or is it because it's just easier to get twentysomethings to play teenagers and having them act like actual teenagers would look silly and awkward because being a teenager is silly and awkward.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:24 PM on September 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

One of the same reasons Seventeen is aimed at 13 year olds…to be aspirational. With kids/teens, the easy way is to make something look older/more together/audacious than the people watching it.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:12 PM on September 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

They age up teenagers so they don't go to jail after the screen test.
posted by Oyéah at 7:21 PM on September 18, 2022 [10 favorites]

Does Hollywood scale up teenage antics because the writers always want to pretend that being a teenager is much more mature and awesome than it really is (or bragging that their own personal teen years were), or is it because it's just easier to get twentysomethings to play teenagers and having them act like actual teenagers would look silly and awkward because being a teenager is silly and awkward.

I don’t think it’s anything as complex as that—actors under 18 have restrictions on how many hours they can work per day, what with the required school and rest breaks. It’s just easier to hire twentysomethings and have it look a little goofy in terms of age.
posted by corey flood at 7:23 PM on September 18, 2022 [6 favorites]

Everything about the whole idea of trying to recreate FBDO reminds me of growing up in LA and how often I've seen or heard about people visiting friends or family with logistically impossible if not terribly exhausting itineraries like going to Disneyland, visiting Griffith Park Observatory, hitting up the La Brea Tar pits, visiting MOMA or LACMA, seeing Hollywood or the Walk of Stars and hoping to have enough time left to have a beach barbecue and go swimming for dinner all in the same day or even over 2-3 days.

Which, yeah, it's really easy to underestimate how much driving all of that really is and being provincial is lame and LA isn't all that anyway lots of cities have this issue.

But there's just something, I don't know, there's probably an obscure German compound word for an emotion that describes the feeling of something like "Ok that's cool you want to try to do all of that but it's not really even theoretically possible and also I'm now exhausted just thinking about all of that and I would like to go lay down and further we just don't do that here because it's uncivilized and morally wrong."
posted by loquacious at 7:54 PM on September 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

loquacious, I've done something like that in NYC... but I was the person who had lived there and was planning an itinerary for someone else who just wasn't used to all that walking, and after half a day they demanded that I strike about half the things off my list. (I guess that that LA list requires a car? I've never been, although obviously Disneyland is in Anaheim.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:34 PM on September 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

(I should also mention that I did the same for someone visiting Chicago, and this time I was the one who was worn out, because I was a lot older than I was when I lived there.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:36 PM on September 18, 2022

I still have my doubts that it's all do-able. The last time I went to a baseball game my facial hair was noticeably longer by the time I got out.
posted by Dr. Twist at 9:07 PM on September 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

I just really enjoyed how many people identified what they were doing and were onboard. That must be really common...and now I'm going to have to fly to Chicago...
posted by Toddles at 9:25 PM on September 18, 2022

I guess that that LA list requires a car?

There's literally a movie called Nobody Walks in LA.
posted by axiom at 10:43 PM on September 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

A forgetable recent film, inspired by the essential Missing Persons song.

I went back and watched it a year or two ago and it's really not very good or funny.

Agreed, the fuss made about it's always been baffling.
posted by Rash at 1:06 AM on September 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

Ferris is the ultimate cool kid. He can do no wrong, even his mistakes turn out to be brilliant moves. He is the platonic ideal of the cool 80s kid. That's why the movie makes such an impression. Ever have a day when everything just went right? Couple that with being cooler than Zaphod Beeblebrox and you've got Ferris Bueller's day.

Personally, as a teen, I wanted to be David Lightman over Ferris Bueller, but that's a discussion for another thread.
posted by Hactar at 1:29 AM on September 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ferris is the ultimate cool kid

And somehow you know he's going to be a Republican like his parents.
posted by acb at 2:31 AM on September 19, 2022 [6 favorites]

logistically impossible if not terribly exhausting

This is so common in Florida. People come here thinking they can go to Orlando for the theme parks and just pop down to Key West on a day trip. No, friend, you'll spend an entire day driving if you stop for meals. I guess you could make it a day trip with some meth and a lead foot bad enough to run the risk of getting arrested for speeding.

On a completely different note, I sadly have never had a convertible experience that made me feel like Ferris Bueller. I did sometimes feel like a roadie when driving my boss' conversion van that he bought from a dealer after a band abandoned it when they blew the engine, though. Also a chauffeur when I drove his Mercedes 420SEL for my driving test. That was one long car and it was super easy to accidentally do a burnout or get it sideways, so I was driving in a very sedate manner until the examiner noted that there was a semi truck gaining on us at an alarming rate. It was also one of those cars where it was super easy to get up to a buck twenty on the highway without even noticing, as I did a few months later when driving through a rural part of Oklahoma with said boss to a work site a few hundred miles away from home. At some point he looked over and noticed my speed. All he said was "if you get a ticket, I'm not paying for it."
posted by wierdo at 2:33 AM on September 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

Sure you can fit it all in one day, but the question is can you fit it all in on a GOOD day?
posted by FatherDagon at 6:48 AM on September 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

I imagine this is the case for most places known mostly via media by the people visiting.

Your going to be in Canada for a week and you want to see Niagara Falls, Royal Tyrell, Banff and go whale watching? And squeeze in a visit to Great Aunty who lives in Winnipeg? Ya, No.
posted by Mitheral at 8:05 AM on September 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

(I guess that that LA list requires a car? I've never been, although obviously Disneyland is in Anaheim.)

It does, but you could do most of those things at kid speed, not at adult speed. I think adults assume they spent a long time at each because getting 'value for your money' is a adult thing. Kids don't care if they went to a baseball game for 10 minutes. My kids were tired of La Brea 30 minutes in, so we did the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Santa Monica, Redondo, and a short visit to Griffith Park (not the observatory) all in one day.

You can also say they got lucky with the timings, and that's why their story was movie-worthy.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:48 AM on September 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

Yeah, it's less about kid speed or adult values for money spent - but more about the fact you're going to be spending 90% of the day in a car on the freeway, much of it in stop and go traffic. As well as looking for parking. Likely during the summer when it's blazing hot.

I remember it wasn't weird or uncommon for people with kids to have an emergency pee jug in the car because that was preferable to getting off the freeway and trying to find a public bathroom, especially if you were passing through an industrial part of LA or somewhere that was sincerely sketchy.

Even if you didn't have kids having an emergency pee jug was fairly standard LA freeway equipment like a Thomas Bros Guide map book.

> My kids were tired of La Brea 30 minutes in, so we did the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Santa Monica, Redondo, and a short visit to Griffith Park (not the observatory) all in one day.

That itinerary is possible and doable, as they're relatively closer together. It would be maybe 30-ish miles of driving round trip. You could do that in one day without even hitting a freeway and sticking to surface streets might even be the preferable and more direct option.

I remember most of the family outings I did as a kid was endless hours sitting in a car, and my siblings and I all had our boredom coping strategies like having a walkman and a bag of tapes and a bunch of extra batteries, a couple of books or other distractions. When the GameBoy came out it was revolutionary and none too soon.

And if we were going on that kind of road trip it was very rare we actually stopped somewhere for a leisurely meal. It was more like you had a cooler full of sandwiches or food and you ate while moving the whole time.

There is a thing that even residents in LA try to do sometimes just for fun where you can go surfing and skiing in the same day just to say you've done it. Start early with a dawn patrol session and hit up some waves just at sunrise, hit the road before noon, maybe grab some lunch and then drive up to Big Bear and ski until after dark if they have night time skiing going on, drive home down the mountain in the dark and then maybe get home before midnight.

But I definitely remember extended family visiting from out of state and outlining itineraries so far flung that it would provoke - at best - polite if not nervous laughter from my mom because they would be ridiculous to the point it was something like wanting to go to the San Diego Zoo, Disneyland, Hollywood, a beach and then even Death Valley or Joshua Tree all in the same day. Death valley alone is like 3-4 hours of driving (one way!) from central LA.

That would be something like 500-600 miles of driving in one day. Much of it on busy, crowded freeway corridors.

As an anecdotal example of how bad it can be, I remember one time a friend of mine just wanted to drive out to the desert as a day trip. We started out some time before noon. But we failed to realize it was Labor Day weekend or something, and we got stuck on the 91 in gridlocked traffic for three hours long before we even made it to the 15 interchange. The traffic was so bad that day you could have biked or walked it in less time.

We ended up trying an alternate route by detouring down one of the then-new toll roads much further south into south Orange County - which took a hilariously short amount of time to not only reverse all of our progress but also double or triple the distance from where we were actually trying to go. And then we tried taking Ortega Highway over the mountains to Lake Elsinore, trying to head north from there through San Bernadino and finally made it to the 15 via back roads where it was again gridlocked.

We never even made it to the pass over the mountains into the desert and ended up just pulling off the 15 near Vasquez Rocks where we hung out for about 15 minutes as the sun was setting and turned around and went home. I think we spent over 8-9 hours and several hundred miles driving that day.
posted by loquacious at 11:56 AM on September 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

IDK, I personally think LA's (and most of the south's) commute pattern is so terrible that it's not visitors who are wrong, it's locals who accept and defend the status quo with such disdain for alternative transport and density. The first LA rail line to the beach only opened in like 2015! And if land is so valuable, why is so much wasted on strip malls that look exactly like Kingman or Amarillo? Why so much hate for mass transit.

Sure, trips across multiple MSAs might be a bit outrageous (and that idea that you can do so many is universal to every state, but the attractions are different) but within a city? The city should be collectively embarrassed. And Chicago should be proud that a silly movie provided a full day worth of moderately fun activities across a spectrum of interests.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:55 PM on September 19, 2022

> Your going to be in Canada for a week and you want to see Niagara Falls, Royal Tyrell, Banff and go whale watching? And squeeze in a visit to Great Aunty who lives in Winnipeg? Ya, No.

This is just further evidence that Canada needs a high speed rail corridor, roughly adjacent to the Trans Canada Highway (this gets awkward in areas like Alberta, where the Trans Canada is somehow both the Yellowhead Trail in Edmonton through to Winnipeg, but also down south in Calgary heading out to Banff and into BC, but that's something we can figure out later, or even solve with the also-never-going-happen high speed rail corridor between Edmonton and Calgary)
posted by asnider at 1:24 PM on September 19, 2022

We never even made it to the pass over the mountains into the desert and ended up just pulling off the 15 near Vasquez Rocks where we hung out for about 15 minutes as the sun was setting and turned around and went home.

But Vasquez Rocks, though! To a Trekkie, that's like visiting some place in the Middle East that's mentioned in the Bible.

Something that I just watched--probably because of this thread--was Todd in the Shadows' (previously/recently on the blue) One Hit Wonderland video on "Oh Yeah". Not even Yello's biggest hit, as it turns out.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:11 PM on September 19, 2022

The best Ferris Tour of NYC is actually the Ghostbusters tour, where you start up at Columbia and work your way down through Manhattan. I can find my notes if anyone requires them, but you do end up at the fire station, where in my experience, the FDNY person working will be willing to show you the Slimer mascot inside but not let you slide down the pole. One of the best days I've had in the city, when even my most city-jaded buddies wanted to show up for the fun. And it was fun.
posted by lauranesson at 6:42 PM on September 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm reminded of the time I invited a friend along for a trip to Walt Disney World and he thought we'd "see it all in one day and then go to the beach."

My memories of Ferris Bueller are that he was a sort of wish-fulfillment character. I don't think I'd necessarily enjoy hanging out with him, but I'd like to have his power of being able to do what I want without consequences.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:50 PM on September 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

IDK, I personally think LA's (and most of the south's) commute pattern is so terrible that it's not visitors who are wrong, it's locals who accept and defend the status quo with such disdain for alternative transport and density.

Oh, I'm not defending LA, or it's sprawl or transportation issues in the slightest. It's totally fucked up and it can be difficult to wrap one's head around if you haven't been there.

This isn't just an LA problem, either. The US Southwest and the US in general deals with this a lot, particularly with European visitors that underestimate how far it is between places and how it's not really possible to comfortably see the Grand Canyon, LA, San Francisco and, say, Vegas all in a short weekend or even week long trip.

I'm mainly just musing about perceptions of geography and how much people sometimes try to cram into too little time, and how it often relates to perceptions as presented in media and film and the time dilation effects of a movie that makes it look so easy.
posted by loquacious at 7:02 PM on September 19, 2022

Not listening to the right music: Oh Yeah - YouTube.

LA wise, we're huge: Los Angeles County, California, Population vs. State Populations.

Also LA wise... there was this trip from Eagle Rock/Pasadena in the Valley to the airport, a forgotten ticket and a trip back to eagle rock and back to the airport that happened that happened within an hour taking surface streets. Still caught my flight. Friend was driving a fast car. Very OMG about to die (but not really).

Groundhog Day like, there was an optimal path to USC, mostly traffic invariant. And from there there's an optimal path to the airport area, mostly traffic invariant. Plenty of alternates for situations. Traveled enough that this route beats the freeway or at least is consistent. I do the same thing with picking the fastest line at the supermarket or the fastest lane on the freeway from repetition.

I like the Groundhog Day theory. I have this Fantasy/Story rolling around in my head about and imaginary summer romance. There's already too many things to cram into that summer. And there's too many things to cram into that first day so that it starts at 9am when I go to work to pick up my check and ends with an early already planned dinner and movie and about 10 or 11pm and meeting parents and surprise boyfriend. But it's still a rather tight nay impossible schedule.

FBDO could be Groundhog Day, or just luck, or a combination of tried and true little bits that are just organized/logistics sequenced together. Oh Yeah!
posted by zengargoyle at 7:33 AM on September 20, 2022

Ferris around and find out.
posted by kirkaracha at 9:06 AM on September 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ferris Bueller's Day Off is better when you realize that Cameron is the protagonist of the story and Ferris is his manic pixie dream boy.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 12:27 PM on September 20, 2022 [5 favorites]