Encino Man (1992)

— Ow, my pancreas.

Oh, so that's where that meme comes from. Two questions, though. First, this was released only four months after Wayne's World, yet it also includes a sequence where stoner-coded adolescents have fun to a Queen song. Surely that wasn't enough time to rip it off? Secondly, why was Matt wearing a white tie marcella waistcoat with a white bow-tie with black tie trousers and jacket?

Anyway, I probably watched this at the right distance from the early 1990s so this reads as a curious period piece rather than yet another part of the 'MTV generation' slop. As ephemeral as critics at the time said it was, MTV is now no longer a force in our culture, whilst Encino Man lives on in a strange, cult way. Still, what makes Bill & Ted, Wayne's World, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back work on a (slightly) higher level is that they are essentially buddy movies with walk-on roles. However, as soon as the titular Encino Man appears, then Brendan Fraser is just as much a third wheel as Dave is around Robyn.

I went into this knowing literally zero about Pauly Shore, but you could somehow tell that he had a character/personality that lived outside the world of the movie. It's thus somewhat hilarious to learn that he'll be 60 within a few years and is still doing the same schtick, except with a kind of politics that, how can I phase it, is easy prey for genuine reactionaries.

Teenagers certainly deserve smart movies with heavy themes and serious subject matter. But sometimes you’re just goofing off with your friends and you want to see Brendan Fraser flopping his body around a high school gymnasium. Encino Man is very much a product of the ‘90s, but that’s what makes it so fun to rewatch as the years go by. Aesthetics change and the way we talk about movies has changed. Maybe now, as the ‘90s become vintage and Brendan Fraser reenters the mainstream, we can finally appreciate Encino Man for the movie it was always trying to be. Encino Man pulled off an impressive feat: Being good at being dumb.

— Leilla Jordan (Paste Magazine, 2022)

There are a lot of funny ideas in Encino Man that don’t come off because the director [and] his screenwriter [don't] seem to have made up their minds how smart they want to be. [The] film would be better if it were more subversive, more in the Saturday Night Live mode. Compared to an SNL routine[,] Encino Man (rated PG) is much too tame. No doubt this tameness is a commercial strategy but it’s limiting. Young audiences are open to a looser, hipper comedy than they’ve been getting in the movies. Shouldn’t movies be more outrageous than television?

— Peter Rainer (Los Angeles Times)

In the 1910s, Ishi (meaning ‘man’ in his native Yana language), one of the few Yahi people who had survived the California gold rush, was a main attraction at the Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco. He became a source of fascination for the local press – headlines referred to him as ‘the wild man of California’ and ‘a genuine survivor of Stone Age barbarism’ – before succumbing to tuberculosis in 1916. Museum officials dissected Ishi’s body and sent his brain to the Smithsonian.

— Oliver Cussen (London Review of Books)