Tomorrow marks the release of Mike Judge’s new cult classic Idiocracy on DVD, and for most of you it’s the first time you’ll have a chance to see it. As they did with Mike’s other work of movie brilliance Office Space, Fox bungled the film’s theatrical rollout. They buried it in one or two theaters around the country and then to make things worse didn’t bother to advertise it. Idiocracy never even had a proper movie poster, let alone a marketing campaign.
To remind everyone of just why Mike Judge is so damn great and why you need to be one of the first people in line tomorrow morning to buy Idiocracy, I’ve dug up two Mike Judge musical montages from his office drudgery masterwork Office Space. Like everyone else, I missed it in theaters. Later after hearing from friends how awesome it was, I discovered it on VHS. Ah the days before my first DVD player. At the time I was working as an underpaid receptionist (yes men can answer phones too) at an insurance office, and the film spoke to me in a way no other had.
A few months later I finished college and got my first engineering job, and the similarities between Peter’s life and my own became so many that it got a little scary. Office Space is set at a high-tech company in an industrial park in Dallas. I worked at a high-tech company in a Dallas industrial park. Peter is an engineer who works just hard enough not to get fired. I was an engineer who worked just hard enough to get fired. The Dallas restaurant they filmed Peter’s scenes with Jennifer Aniston in was only a couple of miles from where I worked, and my coworkers and I often went there for lunch. My boss was addicted to coffee and while he didn’t say “yeah” a lot, he was pretty damn good at making my life a living hell. Peter’s cube even looked like my cubical, and it was then that I realized every day I woke up and had to go to work, I was having the worst day of my life. It was Office Space that inspired me to get out of that hell, though I stopped short of cleaning fish in my cubicle I did eat a few cheetohs.
So, below are two killer musical montages from Office Space for all of you still stuck in your cubicles praying for sweet release. I feel your pain. Consider waking up tomorrow and just not going to work. Damn it feels good to be gangsta.
