Pauly Shore
MTV's most relentless goofball — The Weasel, all surfer-dude Valley-speak, somehow the defining voice of early-90s cable. Pauly Shore rode that energy into a five-film leading-man run that shrank at the box office with every release while the Razzies stacked up. Then he made a mockumentary about the wreckage, because he was always in on the joke.
Paul Montgomery Shore was born in Beverly Hills on February 1, 1968, to comedy royalty of a very specific kind: his father Sammy Shore co-founded The Comedy Store, and his mother Mitzi Shore owned and ran the club from 1974 until her death in 2018. He grew up around the place, took the stand-up stage himself at seventeen, and was mentored by Sam Kinison. Out of the clubs came "The Weasel" — a surfer-dude persona in pure Valley-speak, peppered with "edged," "melons," "grinding," and the catchphrase "Hey, BU-DDY" that kids found hilarious and parents found grating.
MTV picked him up as a VJ in 1989, and for the next five years he was inescapable — hosting the network's Spring Break parties and fronting his own show, Totally Pauly, which launched in 1990 and aired intermittently until 1997. He was cable's id: unfiltered, unserious, and beamed straight into every living room with basic cable. That was the entire appeal.
Hollywood came calling. Encino Man (1992) was a modest hit, enough to make him a leading man: Son in Law (1993), In the Army Now (1994), Jury Duty (1995), Bio-Dome (1996). But each film grossed less than the one before, and critics were merciless — the last three all languish in or around the single digits on Rotten Tomatoes, and Roger Ebert wrote that Shore "bypasses all categories to achieve a kind of transcendent fingernails-on-the-blackboard effect." At least A Goofy Movie (1995), where he voiced Bobby Zimuruski, gave him one innocent credit in the pile. The Razzies made it official: Worst New Star for Encino Man, Worst Actor for Bio-Dome (a tie with Tom Arnold), and Worst New Star of the Decade for the entire 1990s.
By 1997, his sitcom Pauly was cancelled after five episodes aired, and the guy who'd been everywhere was suddenly nowhere. But Shore never pretended the fall didn't happen. In 2003 he produced, wrote, directed and starred in Pauly Shore Is Dead, a semi-autobiographical mockumentary that faced the wreckage head-on and made it funny. That's the strange staying power of the Weasel: despised by critics exactly as fiercely as he was adored by kids with cable, he outlasted the punchline by agreeing to be it.
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In the Army Now
Pauly Shore in dog tags: two buddies join the Army Reserves to bankroll their dream electronics store — one weekend a month, two weeks a year, right? — and get shipped to an actual desert war. Nobody's idea of a critical darling, but a mid-90s cable staple a whole generation half-remembers without ever having chosen to watch it.
Bio-Dome
Two slackers wander into what they think is a mall looking for a bathroom and get hermetically sealed into a year-long ecological experiment. Critics handed it a 1/100 on Metacritic — tied for the lowest score in the site's history; kids with cable memorized every line anyway. Bio-Dome is the purest specimen of the gap between what the industry decided and what actually lived on late-night rotation.
Brendan Fraser
The decade's most likable leading man: caveman in Encino Man, gentleman in School Ties, jungle king in George of the Jungle, and finally the revolver-twirling hero of The Mummy. Hollywood's nicest action star — and the comeback story the whole internet rooted for.
Encino Man
Two teenagers dig up a frozen caveman while excavating a backyard pool, thaw him out, and enroll him in high school. Brendan Fraser as Link, Sean Astin, and peak "weasel"-era Pauly Shore — critics gave it thumbs down, audiences gave it an A, and every '90s sleepover gave it another run.