In 2000, Phil Stark wrote a very simple comedy movie about two lovable stoners (Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott) who lose their car. Now the man behind Dude, Where’s My Car? wants to distance himself from the movie itself. The 52-year-old screenwriter has resurfaced with a Hollywood Reporter op-ed, basically telling the world: “My bad.”
Released December 15, 2000, the movie turned a forehead-slapping question into a cultural catchphrase. The movie title itself seemed bigger than the actual movie. But teens and stoners lined up, laughed, and even bought the DVD. It made solid money and helped blast Kutcher from That ’70s Show and Scott from American Pie even deeper into pop culture – even if it was for playing the goofiest characters on screen that year.
Back then, Phil Stark was riding high, too. Fresh from writing on That ’70s Show and the first season of South Park, the writer had scored a feature agent overnight. He describes his Hollywood hustle like this: “In 1998 I was an aspiring screenwriter living in a small apartment in Hollywood… smoking weed and eating takeout Chinese food while writing a screenplay about two dudes who smoked weed and ate takeout Chinese food.”
So, it was a biopic? Not quite. Stark wanted to channel the Marx Brothers, filtered through Cheech and Chong, delivered as one wild night full of fake rap videos, stoned dogs, and aliens. If you remember, Hollywood loved that sort of stuff in the late ’90s.Movie theaters were thriving, and teen audiences were spending freely at cinemas instead of scrolling social media. So a broad, goofy comedy starring two rising young actors went straight up the box office.
But after a recent rewatch of Dude, Where’s My Car?, Stark says: “I was struck by just how much I cringed at the humor. What made me cringe is how, 25 years later, some of the comedy feels so dated, even offensive.” He points to jokes targeting “transgender people, ethnic minorities, women, gay men, religious cults, and Fabio.”
He wonders: “Did it feel this cringey 25 years ago? I don’t think so. The humor seemed appropriate at the time.”
Maybe the real surprise isn’t the offensive humor in Dude, Where’s My Car? It’s that it took so many years for Stark to realise how cringe it all was. Thankfully, he stepped away from Hollywood to become a therapist after, saving us all from more brain-melting comedies.
Dude, Where’s My Car? made its money, sure. But now its creator is thinking… “Dude, what was I thinking?” Maybe that’s a sequel idea.
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