I think Danke Schoen was suggested by Broderick, but I can't say for certain. There's something wonderfully unexpected about that choice of song, it's our first sign of Ferris having a wide range of interests beyond what we would expect for a typical teenager. A kid would sing rock and roll in the shower, who would sing a Wayne Newton staple? The fourth-wall breaking is something I had been thinking about recently, I think if that wasn't in the movie, we wouldn't like Ferris. The character gets to do whatever he wants, lies to everyone, operates under his own agenda with almost no consequences... we should hate that. We should react like Jeannie. But because Ferris opens up to us, lets us in on what he's doing and how he's feeling (he's more open with us than anyone else in the flick), we feel included We're part of the scam, he's not lying to us, and I think that improves the movie in ways that we're not immediately aware of. It's okay that everyone's fooled by Ferris because we're fooling them too, when we see the Save Ferris water cooler, we're not thinking "wow these people are gullible and stupid," we think "I can't believe how well our scam is working!" It's funny when you look at the movie and realize it's sort of an inverted high school movie, everything you expect is flipped on its head. At the start of the day, you usually have a character racing to get to school. Here, Ferris actually has to wait around the house and kill time before his car arrives. In school, you're stuck in a location with people you don't want to be with. Here, Ferris has the whole city to explore and his best friend and his girlfriend to do it with. At school you have the teachers telling you what to learn, and you don't care. Here, Ferris and friends go to the stock market, to a museum of beautiful art, they expand their minds more because they want to. Instead of running boring laps and getting yelled at by a teacher on a golf kart, they take in a Cubs game. And instead of horrible cafeteria food, they ate-- they ate pancreas.

Great reflections, Chris. Here's another inversion for you: What if you look at the story through the eyes of Cameron as Protagonist? In one key way -- Which character goes through the most significant transformation -- Cameron qualifies, especially Ferris doesn't change at all. In fact, he's more of a Change Agent. There's a blog post I did maybe 7 years ago about this very subject. Don't have time to check for it just now, but I'll make a note to look for it. I will miss John Hughes until the day I expire. Nobody is doing nowadays what he did. A truly unique talent.

There was a theory I heard ages back that Ferris isn't even a real character, or that the events aren't really happening and the whole movie is a dream that Cameron is having. I wouldn't go that far, but I think a lot of people picked up on the idea of Cameron being a stealth protagonist. I feel like the Cameron character came first, and that Ferris was just the most interesting way to explore that, but I'm not sure. Cameron seems to be the realistic, logical extension of the wet blanket "I don't think that's a good idea, guys" stock character, the same way that the Breakfast Club characters are all fleshed-out of the stock characters we see in high school flicks. But in other movies, the wet blanket's fear is just "oh my god, I'm gonna get grounded forever!" but Cameron is terrified and we sense it and it screws him up on a fundamental level. What better way to contrast a character who's afraid of everything than with a character who's not afraid of anything? Who sees nothing but potential?