On this day in 1985, Ferris Bueller took his legendary ‘Day Off’

As the titular character at the centre of 1986 classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off puts it, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it…”

But on this day in 1985, however, Ferris certainly didn’t miss out on anything.

There’s been a lot of speculation as to the exact day that Ferris Bueller plays hooky, but one eager sports fan has pinpointed June 5th, 1985 as the afternoon in question.

Following exhaustive analysis of baseball scores from around the 1985-86 period, (the movie was released in July 1986), Larry Granillo noticed that during their epic day-long adventure – Ferris and friends Cameron and Sloane show up at Wrigley Field, the home of the Chicago Cubs.

Based on the limited baseball coverage we see in the movie, Granillo determined that the footage must have been shot during an actual Cubs match, against the Atlanta Braves, which started at 1.25pm that day.

Things start to get a little bit complicated, timeline wise, given the often lengthy time a baseball match takes to complete.

As Granillo writes, “The eleven-inning game took 3:09 to complete, which means that the foul ball Ferris catches had to have been sometime after 4:00pm. That leaves, at the most, one hour and forty-five minutes for their trips to the museum, Sears Tower, the lake, and Sloane’s house, while squeezing in two musical numbers during the parade before racing home at 5:55pm. Seems a bit tough to squeeze all of that in for most normal people.

“But, seeing as Ferris has the magical ability to sound exactly like both a young Wayne Newton and a young John Lennon, I’m willing to believe he could make the schedule work.”

Plus, anyone who struts his stuff to the magnificence of Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s Love Missile F1-11 can do whatever he wants, in our book.

All together now… “Bueller… Bueller…”