Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
"It seems to me the only thing you've learned is that Caesar is a 'salad dressing dude.'"
For those who are interested in visiting or re-visiting a bit of nostalgia from the late 1980s, I highly recommend Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. If you want your kids to understand why now and again a “gnarly” or “dude” escapes your lips, show them this.
The movie is pure escapism that combines quirky situational humor by combining historical figures with the science fiction of time travel. You’ll find yourself laughing quite a bit during the entire movie, whether in response to the off played, yet sometimes brilliant dialogue, or at the fashion and fads of a movie that’s now twenty-odd years old. (In all seriousness, when was the last time you saw a telephone booth, let alone a functioning one?)
I remembered seeing this movie for the first time at the drive-in in 1989. Were they awesome or what? Food could be snuck in, you didn't have to worry about people talking behind you, and if the second film of the double-feature stunk, you could drive off and still get the children to bed on time.
For those not familiar with the plot-line I’ll give you a quick rundown: Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) are two dimwitted high school students who are on the verge of flunking their senior year at San Dimas High School. They only have one saving grace in hopes to graduate: ace their high school history class presentation. While on a study break at the Circle-K, Bill and Ted are visited by Rufus (George Carlin), a man who claims to be from the future. Rufus has been given the assignment to assist the two high school losers by letting them use a “time traveling telephone booth” to help them put together their history presentation. According to Rufus, Bill and Ted are considered “the great ones” seven hundred years into the future, whose music has aligned the planets and brought world peace. However, if they don’t graduate, Ted will be shipped off to Alaska Military Academy and they’ll never be able to form their band “Wyld Stallyns” or create their music.
The biggest reason why I recommend that you see Bill & Ted is that it’s funny and creative, yet also a semi-educational movie, which my parents approved of because its subject matter was generally clean. Most of the adult-natured jokes that were made (“Sixty-nine, dudes!”) went right over my thirteen-year-old head and didn't sink in until after I was halfway through high school. It brought historical figures that I read about to life and put them into situations that seemed, at that time, relatively implausible. Who wouldn't enjoy tossing a Nerf football with Billy the Kid or Socrates? Just imagine the conversations you could have, especially if you spoke ancient Greek.
It stars a large cast of mostly nobodies for that time, with a few cameos like Jane Wiedlin (from The Go-Go’s) as Joan of Arc and Clarence Clemons (from Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band) as one of “The Three Most Important People in the World.” Alex Winter had received the most noticeable screen fame at that time for portraying a vampire in The Lost Boys back in 1987. But this movie was really Keanu Reeves’ launching pad, and typecast him forever as an airhead, which isn’t completely inaccurate. Reeves had been in a hand full of other films before Bill & Ted, but it wasn’t until this film and the release of Parenthood later that year, which firmly placed him on the map.
As much as Bill & Ted was a success, it also had the unfortunate side-effect of reinforcing the southern California stereotype. Just like the stereotypical Southern redneck or New York city slicker, the American general public presumed that most, if not all teenagers who lived in southern California, talked, dressed, and acted like a stoned loser who used the words “bogus” and “dude” in their vocabulary on a regular basis. Born and raised there myself, I can guarantee that they don’t, dude. (Sorry, couldn't help myself.)
Film Geek Footnotes:
For those who are interested in visiting or re-visiting a bit of nostalgia from the late 1980s, I highly recommend Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. If you want your kids to understand why now and again a “gnarly” or “dude” escapes your lips, show them this.
The movie is pure escapism that combines quirky situational humor by combining historical figures with the science fiction of time travel. You’ll find yourself laughing quite a bit during the entire movie, whether in response to the off played, yet sometimes brilliant dialogue, or at the fashion and fads of a movie that’s now twenty-odd years old. (In all seriousness, when was the last time you saw a telephone booth, let alone a functioning one?)
For those not familiar with the plot-line I’ll give you a quick rundown: Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) are two dimwitted high school students who are on the verge of flunking their senior year at San Dimas High School. They only have one saving grace in hopes to graduate: ace their high school history class presentation. While on a study break at the Circle-K, Bill and Ted are visited by Rufus (George Carlin), a man who claims to be from the future. Rufus has been given the assignment to assist the two high school losers by letting them use a “time traveling telephone booth” to help them put together their history presentation. According to Rufus, Bill and Ted are considered “the great ones” seven hundred years into the future, whose music has aligned the planets and brought world peace. However, if they don’t graduate, Ted will be shipped off to Alaska Military Academy and they’ll never be able to form their band “Wyld Stallyns” or create their music.
It stars a large cast of mostly nobodies for that time, with a few cameos like Jane Wiedlin (from The Go-Go’s) as Joan of Arc and Clarence Clemons (from Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band) as one of “The Three Most Important People in the World.” Alex Winter had received the most noticeable screen fame at that time for portraying a vampire in The Lost Boys back in 1987. But this movie was really Keanu Reeves’ launching pad, and typecast him forever as an airhead, which isn’t completely inaccurate. Reeves had been in a hand full of other films before Bill & Ted, but it wasn’t until this film and the release of Parenthood later that year, which firmly placed him on the map.
As much as Bill & Ted was a success, it also had the unfortunate side-effect of reinforcing the southern California stereotype. Just like the stereotypical Southern redneck or New York city slicker, the American general public presumed that most, if not all teenagers who lived in southern California, talked, dressed, and acted like a stoned loser who used the words “bogus” and “dude” in their vocabulary on a regular basis. Born and raised there myself, I can guarantee that they don’t, dude. (Sorry, couldn't help myself.)
Film Geek Footnotes:
- Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure sat on the shelves for almost two years before it was released when the film’s original distributor went bankrupt (it was later purchased by Orion Pictures, which ironically went bankrupt ten years later). The film was released in February of 1989 and was quite the commercial success, generating over $40 million in ticket sales on a budget of $10 million. The film’s success went on to produce the less-than-stellar sequel, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, as well as a Saturday morning cartoon series that ran for 21 episodes back in 1990-91 and actually featured the voices of Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter and George Carlin.
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