Matt Damon’s EuroTrip song “Scotty Doesn’t Know” isn’t just a catchy pop-punk anthem, it helped bring a woman out of a coma too. Released in 2004, teen comedy EuroTrip follows the adventures of four high school graduates – Scotty (Scott Mechlowicz), Cooper (Jacob Pitts), Jenny (Michelle Trachtenberg) and Jamie (Travis Wester) – as they gallivant through Europe in search of Scotty’s attractive German pen pal. It was a box office bomb, but it’s become something of a cult classic thanks in part to a brilliant celebrity cameo and a song so popular it’s often seen EuroTrip referred to as the “Scotty Doesn’t Know movie.”
In EuroTrip’s first act, Scotty is unceremoniously dumped by his cheating high school sweetheart Fiona (Kristin Kreuk). Later at a graduation party Scotty suffers further humiliation when a Blink 182-style pop-punk band led by a pierced, tattooed singer who’s played by none other than a lip-syncing Matt Damon perform a little ditty called “Scotty Doesn’t Know,” which details Fiona’s infidelity. While the song doesn’t exactly boast poet laureate levels of lyrical genius, the “Scotty Doesn’t Know” lyrics – which include choice lines like “I can't believe he's so trusting, While I'm right behind you thrusting” – certainly get the point across.
It’s one of the best scenes in the movie and there’s a great story behind how Matt Damon came to join the cast of EuroTrip too. Damon went to college with EuroTrip director Jeff Schaffer and writers Alec Berg and David Mandel and just happened to be filming The Brothers Grimm in Prague at the same time they were shooting EuroTrip in the Czech capital. Schaffer, Berg and Mandel asked Damon if he’d be up for a EuroTrip cameo and the rest, as they say, is cinematic history. But “Scotty Doesn’t Know” isn’t just a pop-punk classic – it apparently has the ability to bring people out of comas too.
According to an interview with Uproxx, Nick Cloutman – who plays bass in Lustra, the band who wrote “Scotty Doesn’t Know” and performed alongside Matt Damon in EuroTrip – he was once told an amazing anecdote about the song. A woman informed him her friend was in a car accident and slipping into a coma while being rescued by paramedics when her phone started ringing. The woman just happened to have Lustra’s “Scotty Doesn’t Know” as her ringtone and, in her dazed state, started singing along, effectively saving her from falling into a coma.
Clearly, the legacy of “Scotty Doesn’t Know” lives on beyond the EuroTrip soundtrack but the song isn’t just responsible for bringing someone out of a coma. In 2018, the song was used in an internet prank when Australian prime minister Scott Morrison forgot to renew his website domain name and it was snapped up by a troll who removed all mention of Morrison’s policies from the site, replacing the content with “Scotty Doesn’t Know” playing on repeat. And, according to EuroTrip director Jeff Schaffer, Matt Damon still has people come up to him singing the lyrics to “Scotty Doesn’t Know” nearly 20 years after the movie’s release. Well, the song is a classic.