2017 marked the 25th anniversary of the release of Wayne's World, everyone's favorite film about a public access cable show set in suburban Illinois.
As you may recall, Wayne's World is chock full of quotable lines and moments, with plenty of relatable scenes from a slacker lifestyle, cruising to Bohemian Rhapsody or wasting hours in a donut shop.
For guitarists, though, Wayne's most relatable experience comes as he painfully longs for a classic vintage guitar that will forever be just out of his reach. Who hasn't been there?
Here's a quick montage of the relevant scenes from the movie as a refresher:
As Cassandra summarizes in the film, the guitar in question is a "'64 Fender Stratocaster in classic white, with triple single-coil pickups and a whammy bar."
Wayne astutely adds that the guitar's year would make it pre-CBS. For those who aren't vintage guitar nerds, this refers to a period of time before Fender was purchased by the CBS corporation, which lowered quality control and rendered guitars made after 1965 far less desirable to collectors.
Cassandra's observation that the Strat has three single-coils and a whammy bar isn't especially noteworthy, as almost all Strats from that year would have those exact specs. Fender did produce some non-tremolo (aka Hard Tail) Strats in the '50s and '60s, though they aren't very common or coveted, and no Strats would appear with pickups other than single-coils until sometime after that.
The crucial detail for our purposes is the finish. Cassandra describes the guitar as "classic white," though the official name of the finish from this period would be "olympic white"—which was only available from Fender via special order—making it a much rarer guitar than a standard sunburst Strat of the same year.
As for pricing, values on vintage Strats have cooled off a bit since the peak of the market around 2007. Today, based on recent Reverb sales data, an original, excellent-condition, 1964 Stratocaster in Olympic White would likely sell in the $16,000 to $22,000 range. Ten years ago, when Strats were a little more en vogue with collectors, it could have gone for upwards of $30,000 or more.
Now in the movie, there's no telling how much Wayne had to pay for the guitar, based on the random fistfuls of cash he holds up to the clerk at the “Stairway”-banning guitar store. But since he's pretty much broke at the beginning of the film and the signing check he gets is for $5,000, we can assume he paid less than that, and thus made a pretty good investment out of what was supposed to be his indulgent splurge. So you know, Party Time, Excellent.