8 Ways Dude, Where’s My Car? Is Actually Underrated

Movie studios have always aimed films at teenagers, but late ’90s and early 2000s teen movies were a different breed of teen movie. From American Pie to Road Trip, the movie industry landscape was full of penis jokes, weed references, and not much else.

An outlier at the time was Dude, Where’s My Car? Although it featured those familiar teen-movie tropes, it was also full of absurdist humor and genre-bending. The 2000 movie was criticized for being too immature and nonsensical for its own good. However, between its absurdist satire, its unusual sci-fi elements, and its surprisingly strong leads, the film is severely underrated.

8 It Does The Hangover Better Than The Hangover

The premise of Dude, Where’s My Car? is essentially laid out in the title. Jesse and Chester wake up in the morning to find their car missing after a long night of partying and drinking. What follows is the characters, who don’t remember a thing, having to retrace their steps from the night before. That’s almost the exact premise of The Hangover, only instead of a car, it’s a person that’s missing in that film.

While The Hangover is all about how the characters go to extremes with their bachelor parties and have an ironically unforgettable night, Dude, Where’s My Car outdoes it. And where the Wolf Pack had an unbelievable night partying with Mike Tyson and getting involved with gangsters, Jesse and Chester partied with aliens and got involved with cultists. But keeping itself grounded in reality, as opposed to the absurdist satire of Dude, Where’s My Car?, might be what helped The Hangover become one of the highest-grossing movies of the 2010s.

7 It’s A Stoner Movie That Has No Explicit References To Marijuana

Famous stoner movies such as Half Baked, How High, and even the Coen brothers’ cult classic The Big Lebowski are all focused on marijuana, or at least have a ton of references to it. However, there isn’t a single overt reference to any drug in Dude, Where’s My Car? except for one shot of a dog hallucinating. It makes the film completely unique in the genre.

The movie’s avoidance of referencing drugs and trying to make the audience assume the main characters are high by showing that they’re craving food is fascinatingly strange. It’s almost as if the filmmakers are preserving the innocence of the movie, yet there are still tons of sexual references, nudity, and violence in the film. Despite the absence of overt drug use, Dude, Where’s My Car? still deserves to be called one of the best stoner comedies of all time.

6 Ashton Kutcher And Sean William Scott Make A Great Comedy Duo

Both Ashton Kutcher and Sean William Scott had become famous among college kids in the late ’90s. Kutcher played the slow but good-looking Kelso on That ’70s Show, a sitcom about kids getting high in their parents’ basements, and Scott played Stifler, the prankster in American Pie.

In many ways, their characters in Dude are derivative of those, but they work together so well because Kutcher and Scott played off each other like they had known each other for years. It’s easy to imagine that Stifler and Kelso would be best friends if they existed in the same universe, so Jesse and Chester likewise make a convincing pair. The actors also clearly understood exactly what kind of film they were making and perfectly played into the irrationality of it all.

5 The Sci-Fi Elements

The movie isn’t just a comedy. It’s also an amalgam of many other genres, most notably science-fiction. It expertly builds a world of strange X-Files-type events. For example, there are a group of UFO cultists led by the strange Zoltan and several different alien races.

Then there’s the Continuum Transfunctioner, an extraterrestrial device that hilariously happens to be a Rubix Cube. It might not be a sci-fi narrative with the most depth, but it’s fun to see two completely different genres collide in the way they do in Dude, Where’s My Car?

4 The Zoltan Legacy

There has been a sequel to Dude, Where’s My Car? called Seriously, Dude, Where’s My Car? in development for years, and though it may never see the light of day, the film already lives in many ways.

In the original movie, the strange cult leader Zoltan has his own hand signal, which is how his followers interact with one another. The baseball team the Pittsburgh Pirates became infatuated with the movie and watched it over and over at their clubhouse. They started using the hand signal on the field to congratulate their teammates after a home run.

3 It References Old Sci-Fi Movies

As the teen movie is full of sci-fi-inspired subplots and wild tangents, one of the best comes in the final act. The hilariously named character Super Hot Giant Alien is seemingly based on the 1958 movie Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Dude even replicates the iconic scene of the giant woman stepping over the highway.

The movie references don’t end there either, as there is dialogue that’s directly lifted from The Big Lebowski. As Jesse asks, “Where’s your car dude?” that’s exactly what Walt asks the Dude when his car is stolen.

2 The Nostalgic Soundtrack

There are some movies with unexpectedly good soundtracks, but the 2000s movies are wells of pop-punk treasures. Between teen comedies and the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video-game series, skater music was huge in pop culture at the time.

However, the music was also very of its time, as it’s rarely used in movies anymore. Dude, Where’s My Car? is the best example of a great 2000s movie soundtrack. With songs by bands such as Sum 41, Smash Mouth, and Good Charlotte, the movie’s soundtrack is a time capsule for that kind of music.

1 It Takes The Seinfeld Approach Of “No Hugging, No Learning”

When he was the showrunner of Seinfeld, Larry David had the rule of “no hugging, no learning,” which meant that the episodes couldn’t have any kind of social commentary or heartfelt moments.

When all the sci-fi elements are taken away from the movie, it’s a teen movie through and through. The only difference is that most teen movies still have some kind of a schmalzy ending, and even American Pie has some life lessons. Dude, Where’s My Car, on the other hand, takes the Seinfeld approach, and even when they propose to their girlfriends, it’s still hilariously void of any emotion.