Cable Is Key for ‘Wayne’ : Movies: MTV and Comedy Central help propel the ‘Saturday Night Live’ offshoot to a record-breaking opening.

“Wayne’s World” isn’t the first movie to spin off from a TV series, and it certainly won’t be the last. But cable television, a new element in the marketing mix, may have helped push the movie-length version of the popular “Saturday Night Live” skit to its record-breaking $18.1-million opening over the four-day Presidents’ Day holiday.

All weekend long, MTV featured on hourlong special featuring stars Mike Myers and Dana Carvey as veejays spinning rock videos and hosting their makeshift public-access TV show from the basement of their fictitious home. Comedy Central, meanwhile, held a “Wayne’s World” weekend featuring an all-day marathon Saturday. The comedy cable channel has the post-1980 rerun rights to “Saturday Night Live,” including the “Wayne’s World” sketches that started in 1989.

“This is an interesting combination of an established network television entity that has turned into a film and was then promoted to a very segmented audience on cable television,” said John Shea, vice president of marketing and promotion for MTV. “We’ve entered an age now where those kind of promotions can take place.”

The young, urban viewers who take to MTV and Comedy Central are exactly the audiences Paramount Pictures was aiming for and hit head-on. “Wayne’s World” shattered the previous record for a Presidents’ Day holiday film--last year’s debut of “The Silence of the Lambs” with $13.7 million--and also rang up the best February box-office opening yet.

“Needless to say, the viewing audience at MTV in our judgment matched the demographics perfectly of who ‘Wayne’s World’ was aimed at,” said Barry London, president of Paramount’s motion picture group and worldwide distribution. “The MTV programming gave us the ability to totally deliver the message in a very creative, positive way.”

The last time Paramount used MTV in such a fashion was to promote “The Addams Family,” another film based on a TV show. MTV built a national campaign around rapper Hammer’s role as the soundtrack artist on the film, including a flashy music video for the title song. “The Addams Family” opened Nov. 22 at the beginning of the 1991 holiday film season, grossing a blockbuster $24.2 million--with a promotional trailer for “Wayne’s World” attached to the prints sent to movie theaters.

Not surprisingly, Paramount turned to MTV to help push “Wayne’s World.”

“Wayne (Myers) and Garth (Carvey) served as programming for us and promotion for Paramount,” Shea said. “The nice thing about what we were able to do with ‘Wayne’s World’ is create some original programming that really utilized their personalities in a way our audience is used to seeing them. We took great pains to put them in the ‘Wayne’s World’ set from ‘Saturday Night Live.’ But we also took great pains to create a special that had them as veejays, but obviously let them do what they do best.”

Arguably, the biggest marketing push for “Wayne’s World” began in 1975, when “Saturday Night Live” first premiered. Original producer Lorne Michaels, who left the show after five years during its heyday but returned in 1985 to help improve sagging ratings, points to stronger ratings as the key to the theatrical success of “Wayne’s World.”

The late-night series is averaging a solid 9 rating, compared to a 7 rating in the late 1980s. Last Saturday, with “Beverly Hills, 90210” heartthrob Jason Priestly as the guest host, “Saturday Night Live” got an overnight rating of 9.6.

“You rarely see a late-night series improve on a network’s prime-time audience share, which is what we did last Saturday night,” said Michaels, who produced the “Wayne’s World” film as part of a production deal with Paramount. “Nor do you see shows in these days of shrinking network shares improve their ratings, particularly shows that are 17 years old.”

“Wayne’s World” was one of the first films greenlighted by former NBC Entertainment president Brandon Tartikoff when he took over as chairman at Paramount Pictures last year. The movie was shot in 35 days last summer on a low $14-million budget.

While Tartikoff was at NBC, Michaels developed a TV movie version of “Saturday Night Live,” which he indicated Tartikoff might now be interested in as a feature film.