What is Rex Manning Day?
If you are reading this, you fall into one of two groups of people: Those who celebrate Rex Manning Day and those who don’t know what we are talking about when we cheerfully declare, either in the real world or in all caps on social media and usually with more feeling than we do for other holidays, Happy Rex Manning Day!
For those who fall into the latter group, Rex Manning Day is the plot through line of the 1995 movie, Empire Records. If you have never seen it, drop what you are doing and rent it, buy it, stream it, but see it at least once. On the day portrayed in the film, the employees of the Empire Records music store (lovingly modeled on Tower Records, specifically, store #166 in Phoenix, AZ.) are preparing for an in-store appearance by pop heartthrob Rex Manning. We get to learn a lot about the lives and loves of the young employees in a short amount of time, all while they welcome the celebrity and deal with the possible end of their beloved store as they know it.
The best thing about Rex Manning Day as a holiday is you can celebrate it any day, good or bad, and not just on April 8th. Take a look at Twitter on any given day you will see people declaring they are having a “Rex Manning Day” or a similarly named day that comes close to achieving Rex Manning Day levels of awesome. Other times you will see those who are not having the best of days, and yet, they remind themselves that “We mustn’t dwell. No, not today.” Thus, even though the movie gives us the actual date to celebrate Rex Manning Day as an annual event, it really is a holiday which can be celebrated whenever one fancies.
Who do we have to thank for this day as a celebration? The filmmakers and the cast? Certainly. The fact that Talk Like a Pirate Day is a thing? Absolutely. But it really comes down to a two minute scene in the movie, featuring the music of The Buggles and Ethan Embry in a rare and wonderful example of breaking the fourth wall on the big screen, is the reason this holiday is truly burned into our music and movie loving psyches.
Even though it literally ushered in the age of the music video, I can’t hear “Video Killed the Radio Star” without seeing a cardboard cutout of Rex Manning and the fantastic “let’s get ready for the big event” montage in my head. The song, its use in the movie, and the notion of Rex Manning Day have become synonymous to me.
To those who say “do we really need another holiday to celebrate?” I say, absolutely. There are so many different celebrations from the culturally specific, to nerdtastically fun, to there being at least one for every possible type of food imaginable that you can literally celebrate something different every day of the year and thus, we can and should darn well celebrate Rex Manning Day. But why do we celebrate it?
It is funny, isn’t it? A day of celebration surrounding a cult favourite film’s Lothario is an odd thing when looked at by those who aren’t familiar with Empire Records. It really comes down to being a day of excited anticipation and/or celebration for the sake of it. Or perhaps there’s more in the subtext? Those of us who have made Empire Records one of our favourite movies know, it is actually in the movie, or at least it could have been, or perhaps still could be.
(Spoiler warning for those who haven’t seen the movie) Somewhere, on a cutting room floor is a deleted scene where Rex Manning returns at the end of Empire Records, to apologize and to play a song with Berko (played by Coyote Shivers) and his band on the marquee of the building in a scene of redemption for the neither-hero-nor-villain character. (We all know Mitchell Beck is the villain, The Man to be damned after all.)
So, when you are celebrating today, whether you are wearing a purple silk shirt, getting your hair cut too short, baking cupcakes (seriously, there seems to be a metric ton of cupcakery happening today) or watching Empire Records for the umpteenth time, and someone asks you what is Rex Manning Day, wish them an enthusiastic “Say no more, mon amour!” and tell ‘em, or sit them down to watch with you or even send them here.
Now, if you will excuse me, I have to get going on today’s To Do List…
UPDATE: Major props to the Huffington Post's Christopher Rosen for mentioning my (intentionally dated-looking) Rex Manning Day countdown page in this very cool article.
Comments
Post a Comment