When “ Napoleon Dynamite ” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 20 years ago this month, there wasn’t an opening credits sequence. It simply jumped from a black screen to a lanky, deadpan teenager waiting for the school bus.
That got some laughs.
But the moment director Jared Hess knew his film had landed with the audience was partway through, after Napoleon had secured a date for the high school dance and was walking down the street in slow motion, wearing his brown polyester thrift store suit and holding a corsage.
“The audience started to cheer,” Hess previously told the Deseret News . “I’d never been in a screening where people were cheering and clapping for a character. It was just this wash of relief and excitement.”
Even then, in that first screening, people seemed to catch on that Napoleon was an offbeat, everyman figure — the underdog you love to root for.
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