So my wife bought a “30th Anniversary Edition” disc, which coincidentally is about how long it’s been since I saw this movie. I was extremely unsure if it would hold up. Comedy tends to age faster than other material, and comedy aimed at teens based on SNL skits doubly so.

But the good news is that with occasional inevitable exceptions, it mostly does hold up… for an audience of old people that remembers the ’90s in detail. For young people, I think a lot of it would be bizarre and weird. I mean, there’s a completely unexplained Terminator 2 joke, which you could do back then because of course everyone had seen Terminator 2, but that’s probably less true now, even if Jimmy Cams is still a big-time director.

But the biggest thing about the movie that would be incomprehensible to modern youths is the whole motivating driver of the movie: Wayne’s (basically unspoken and assumed) hatred of “selling out.” When a producer discovers Wayne doing his livestream from his basement, and sets him up with a big sponsor and pays the bill to give him professional production quality, we’re supposed to understand automatically that the producer is evil, and the advertiser (who is advertising an arcade, which has a retro-cool vibe, and who is clearly passionate about his machines) is obviously supposed to be a bad guy.

So when Wayne is inexplicably a total asshole to them both, we’re supposed to just immediately be on Wayne’s side, rather than wondering why he’s inexplicably destroying his career and sabotaging his success and being a jerk to these guys. I feel like this motivation is so of-that-era that it takes digging back in time to even understand it.

Beyond that, though, what surprised me is Dana Carvey’s performance. I remember this as a Mike Myers star vehicle, obviously — his character’s name is in the title — but it’s Carvey’s Garth, played as painfully shy and socially awkward, that I found myself liking more. Probably a lot of that is just having been exposed to decades and decades of Myers’ mugging while Carvey stayed lower key, but also I think Carvey is doing subtler character work.

If you’re an old person who watched this movie when you were young, I think it’s arguably worth rewatching if you want. If you’re like me (and in this respect, you probably are not), you’ll be surprised at how many little sayings and tics that have burrowed deep into your brain originated here. Recommended.