IT’S TOTALLY BODACIOUS! THE RETURN OF BILL & TED SCENE
AS THE ICONIC DUDES MAKE A TRIUMPHANT RETURN, LARUSHKA IVAN-ZADEH PARTIES ON
NO WAY! Yes way! After a long 30 years, those bodacious dudes Mr William S Preston, Esquire (Alex Winter) and his best friend, Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan (Keanu Reeves) are finally back in cinemas. Ahead of Bill & Ted Face The Music, out today, here’s our refresher course on all you need to know about the cult sci-fi comedy franchise…
1983
Bill and Ted are conceived in an improv workshop by UCLA students Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson. ‘One day, we decided to do a couple of guys who knew nothing about history, talking about history,’ Solomon told Cinemafantastique, ‘while Ted’s father kept coming up to ask them to turn their music down.’ There was a third guy called Bob, but Bob dropped out.
1984
Solomon and Matheson write the first script, by hand, in just four days in a coffee shop. Originally called Bill & Ted’s Time Van, it saw two nice-but-dim teenagers borrow a van (later judged a bit too close to Back To The Future’s DeLorean) and somehow end up in Nazi Germany where they get up to high jinks with Adolf Hitler (later switched to Napoleon as being less ‘problematic’).
1987
Though Bill and Ted were originally conceived as weedy 14-year-olds, the rather older and cooler Alex Winter (fresh off The Lost Boys) and Keanu Reeves (in his breakthrough role) are cast and the film comes in on time and budget ($8.5m). A most egregious disaster occurs when the distributor files for bankruptcy. However, Bill and Ted are saved from the direct-to-DVD dustbin by a small video company called Nelson Entertainment, which snaps up the movie for a song and makes millions.
1989
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is released (cue air guitar riff)! It sees two loveable metalheads ‘in danger of flunking most heinously’ (Ted) out of their Californian high school unless they can score an A+ final history report. Given they only know Julius Caesar as ‘the salad dressing dude’, failure seems assured. That means Ted will be sent to a military academy and their atrocious rock group, Wyld Stallyns, will be disbanded. Enter Rufus (the late George Carlin) and his time-travelling phone booth from the year 2688. He tells Bill and Ted that their philosophy and music will eventually inspire a new utopia, but only if Wyld Stallyns stay together.
The goofy pair ping-pong through time, collecting historical personages like Socrates (pronounced ‘So Crates’) and Joan of Arc to ace their project and ensure world peace.
1990
Excellent Adventure is such a hit it spawns a TV cartoon series, an entire youth slang lexicon and a breakfast cereal that Alex Winter cheerfully admits was ‘disgusting’.
1991
Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey is released (cue air guitar itar riff)! This bonkers movie e sequel cast a reluctant Joss Ackland (who later said he regretted doing it) as a baddie from the future, who dispatches evil robot replicants of Bill and Ted back to the past to kill our heroes.
Events take a surreal turn as our heroes challenge Death (William Sadler) to a game of Twister, find the meaning of life in a Poison lyric, finally learn to actually play their guitars and produce beards and babies. They sign off to us with ‘Be excellent to each other and party on’.
1991
Bill and Ted is spun-off into a videogame, a live action TV series and a comic book. In a case of life imitating art, Reeves forms an ill-received garage band called Dogstar. He also makes Point Break, which, followed by Speed and The Matrix trilogy, turns him into one of the biggest stars on the planet.
2010
A ‘sad sad Kean Keanu’ meme, of Reeves looking sad in vario various locations, circ circulates online. As if to cheer him up, a first draft of Bill & Ted 3 is created. Hollywood, h however, doesn’t w want it. Alex W Winter directs the mo movie versions of ch children’s TV series Be Ben 10, then turns hi his hand to making feature-length documentaries.
2018
The script is still locked in bogus development hell. The studios want to reboot the franchise with a younger cast but writer Solomon tells Digital Spy, ‘We love these characters and we wanted to visit them again as middle-aged men. We thought it would be really fun, and funny, and sweet.’
2020
Bill & Ted Face The Music is released (cue air guitar riff)! It sees a now middle-aged and married (not to each other) Bill and Ted settled in the suburbs, but yet to fulfil their rock’n’roll destiny. With time ticking, they must write the best song ever to save life as we know it and this time they’re helped by their teenage daughters (Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy-Paine).
After all that, Bill & Ted 4 is already being rumoured. Catch you later, dudes!