A special-edition DVD of Office Space is scheduled to release on Nov. 1, 2005—just in time for my birthday, although that is not a hint for a suggested gift. (The Astaire-Rogers boxed set, on the other hand …) The DVD will include an audio commentary from Mike Judge as well as some deleted scenes. The big question is whether the DVD will include the old animated “Milton” shorts that Mike Judge created before he developed the movie, but I can’t find any info on that yet.
Austinites seem to get a particular kick out of this movie because we find ourselves shouting, “Hey, that’s the apartment where my friend Chris lived!” or “Hey, that’s Metric Blvd!” or “Isn’t that the Alligator Grill?” I think a friend of mine once worked in the building where they shot the office exteriors (Greg, correct me if I am wrong). But what’s really funny is that the road the guys are driving into work in the beginning of the movie is actually in Dallas, not Austin. Helluva commute.
I’ve always felt that Office Space was half a good movie. Unfortunately the plot gets too tangled, loose ends are never tied up (when does he stop being hypnotized? if ever?), and some of it is just lame. Still, my boyfriend bought the DVD a few months ago when it hit rock-bottom prices and it’s an enjoyable late-night fluffy movie.
I get a kick out of the way some guys at the office actually do stuff out of the movie and think they are being ironic. For example, you would not believe the number of guys—and it is in fact the guys … this is not a female thing at all—who wear Hawaiian shirts to the office on Fridays. We considered chipping in to get our boss a red stapler (the story behind the red Swinglines is fascinating, by the way) but we decided it was a bit mean.
And we really do have TPS reports. The manager who devised them had never seen Office Space and didn’t understand why everyone hooted and howled in the meeting where the new reports were unveiled. However, our TPS reports do not require a cover sheet. Thank heaven for small favors.
[DVD news via The Digital Bits.]
2 thoughts on “get out your red stapler”
Comments are closed.
The interiors, too! Although my desk wasn’t located in the area where they shot the movie.
We wore Hawaiian shirts to the office in the mid-eighties on Fridays when I worked for Tandem which is now HP after being Compaq. On other days we didn’t dress up! It was the first place I’d worked where not dressing up was a fine art. One old hippie engineer wore a T-Shirt with an open untucked long-sleeved shirt and jeans and running shoes every single day. He had long gray hair in a pony-tail. This looked so seventies even then. He always smoked, too, when you could still actually smoke around an office. One Halloween another guy came to work with a gray wig in a pony tail, that outfit and a fake cigarette. It was so funny, someone dressing up as someone else. As fun as the (non) dress code was, the place was pretty far off the scale in the male chauvinism category and some of the perks came fraught with baggage. The Friday keggers were religious. My office mate and I were once called down for getting beer and snacks with our buddies and going back to our office for darts. The beer was supposed to fuel a larger gathering of the minds, I suppose. I also remember needing a small little hundred buck converter for some test setup and being denied (we had to bring our own screwdrivers, too, to reliably have one) but they put in a pool and had the company logo tiled into the bottom only they changed the logo before it was built and paid to reorder the new one! I don’t need a movie to see office insanity. No movie could ever capture all the places I worked!