‘Happy Gilmore 2’ Pays Tribute to Bob Barker, Carl Weathers, and Other Late ‘Happy Gilmore’ Actors with One Hilarious Scene

Happy Gilmore 2, which is now streaming on Netflix, is missing several key names who appeared in the first Happy Gilmore movie. That’s not because they didn’t want to come back—it’s because they are no longer with the living. The first movie did film thirty years ago, to be fair. That’s a long time!

Both game show host Bob Barker and actor Carl Weathers, who had big roles in the 1996 film, have died. But Sandler, his co-writer Tim Herlihy, and director Kyle Newacheck found a way to still make sure those legends’ presence was felt in Happy Gilmore 2, in a scene that pays tribute to the famous Sandler vs. Barker fight from Happy Gilmore.

For the uninitiated, Barker made an extended cameo in the first movie, and it was nothing short of legendary. Sandler’s character, Happy Gilmore, gets paired with a celebrity to play in a golf tournament. The celebrity? Former The Price Is Right host Bob Barker. Gilmore doesn’t play a very good game, and Barker gets increasingly sassy with him. The famously hot-headed Gilmore finally snaps, and he and Barker get into a wild, absurd, hilarious fist fight right there on the golf green. It leads to Sandler’s much-quoted line, “The price is wrong, bitch!”

The real Barker died two years ago in 2023, at the age of 99. But Sandler pays tribute to their epic fight in Happy Gilmore 2, with a new fight, this time between Gilmore and his longtime rival, Shooter McGavin, played once again by the hilarious Christopher McDonald.

After attacking Gilmore in the final moments of the first movie, Shooter’s spent the last 30 years locked up in a mental institution. Needless to say, he has a lot of pent-up anger when he and Gilmore finally reunite in a graveyard, where all of the legends from the first movie seem to be buried.

What follows is a brief, but passionate, cemetery brawl between the two aging men, who tumble around the tombstones.

As they fight, we see names on the tombstones for characters played by actors who have passed on: Bob Barker, Chubbs Peterson (played by the late Carl Weathers), Grandma Gilmore (played by the late Frances Bay), and Donald “Jackass!” Floyed (played by the late Joe Flaherty).

That’s not the only tribute to Chubbs, who was Happy’s mentor and golf coach in the first movie, famous for his signature wooden hand following an alligator attack. Happy also meets Chubbs’s son, Slim Peterson, played by comedian Lavell Crawford. Slim, too, has a wooden hand—not because of an alligator, he says, but because of a vending machine accident. As he did with his father, Gilmore immediately breaks Slim’s wooden hand when he tries to shake it.

Although Carl Weather’s character technically died in the first movie—after Gilmore surprised him with the head of the gator, and he fell out of a window in shock—Sandler has said he had originally planned a large role for Weathers. When Weathers unexpectedly died last year at the age of 76, Sandler had to rewrite the script.

Apparently, Weathers had originally been going to appear to Gilmore in dream sequences.

“We had a painful change. Carl Weathers had a massive part,” Sandler said in a recent interview with Collider. “I would talk to Carl, and we were excited, and then Carl passed away. We had to rewrite a lot of the stuff, and even what the story was.”

While it’s sad to see so many OG cast members gone, it’s nice that Happy Gilmore 2 found a way to both honor their memories, and make us laugh. Isn’t that what it’s all about?