“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” was the classic ’80s movie for high school slackers, starring Matthew Broderick as a teenager so supremely confident in his own charm that he’s able to get away with doing pretty much whatever he wants. The result was a massive financial success, with the film grossing over $70 million on a $6 million budget, earning a place in the top 10 box office hits of 1986. So why would you not try to turn that into a film, capturing more of Ferris’s zany adventures? In 1990, NBC did just that. By that point, Matthew Broderick was a superstar, so the role of Ferris went to Charlie Schlatter.
But there was a little twist on the storyline: In the “Ferris Bueller” universe, Schlatter plays the real-life Ferris Bueller who has a movie made about him (“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”). At least in the pilot episode, that’s the case — they don’t ever bring up the movie version ever again after that. Without the involvement of ’80s teen film legend John Hughes, who directed the original film, “Ferris Bueller” struggled to capture the magic of its predecessor, and was canceled after just 13 episodes. But every failure has a silver lining: “Ferris Bueller” gave us one of Jennifer Aniston’s first roles as Jeannie, Ferris’s straight-laced sister.
