Time Travel Week: Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)

1 year ago

Time Travel Week: Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

BE EXCELLENT TO ONE ANOTHER

by Chad Theodore Logan

It was a typically cold, overcast day in Seattle, and my father and I had a rather serious decision to make. We arrived at the movie theater a bit early and, after a quick stop at The Wherehouse to buy, I kid you not, a cassette tape of Bon Jovi’s New Jersey that I had saved up my allowance for, we approached the ticket counter, still undecided. On one hand, we had The Burbs, which I deep down had a feeling my dad probably hoped we would pick, as it was Tom Hanks’ first role post-Big, a decided smash-hit in our household, a film so absolutely amazing that all four of us actually saw it twice in the theater - which was basically unheard of at the time - despite the fact that there was actually an extended scene with a woman wearing a bra in it, which normally would never ever make it past the parental filters, an impenetrable fortress so strict and rigid that even a film like The Princess Bride had failed to scale its walls, due to profanity and/or possible scariness (I was apparently quite easily frightened as a child, at least according to my parents, though one could easily make the equally valid argument that perhaps I was so often scared precisely because I was so rarely exposed to anything scary; chicken or egg, etc etc).

So, anyhow, The Burbs was one option, even though it seemed a bit unappealing to my 11 year old sensibilities. Mind you, I had nothing against the suburbs - we lived in a rather average one, after all, and I was still a good 3-4 years away from a Lynchian distrust of suburbia in general - it’s just that the movie seemed a bit bland. And had Corey Feldman in it.

Our other option for the day was a wild card, a heretofore unknown of sorts, which had opened only a few days earlier to mostly average reviews, very little fanfare, and - thank god - a PG rating. It was called Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

I figured I had a rather Herculean task ahead of me in steering my father toward a film about time travel (to this day, he doesn’t understand most any film with a non-linear timeline), heavy metal, and, just quite possibly, some kissing and/or swearing. Luckily, though, my father had a weak spot, an achilles heel, for “dumb” humor, the more slapstick-y, the better. So, I played the only real two cards I had: “I don’t know, I think the Bill and Ted one looks funnier, in a dumb way, Dad.” I paused before adding for good measure: “The Burbs one seems kind of scary and weird.”

“Let’s do Ted and Bill’s Adventure then,” my dad said, because, no matter what, he always messes up movie titles when he says them out loud to people, which I found endlessly embarrassing every single time. I only later realized, as an adult, that he usually did this on purpose. He thought it was funny. It drove me crazy. He was that kind of guy. But, also, my hero - at least for another year or two.

If I’m remembering this right - and there’s a fair chance that I’m not - it was a fairly empty theater we walked into that February afternoon, armed with snacks. This was often typical for the films we chose to see together (one time we actually were the only people in an entire theater, which I guess is bound to happen when you go to see a matinee showing of Ernest Goes to Jail). We sat there, gobbling popcorn, slurping sodas, eating the candy we had picked up at the AM/PM beforehand and shoved into our pockets to sneak in, and prepared ourselves to watch a film where “History is about to be rewritten by two guys who can’t spell”.

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, of course, tells the story of Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted Theodore Logan, two well-meaning but dim-witted metalheads on the verge of getting an F in their high school history class. Dire consequences await if the two fail the class, as Ted’s dad has assured him that he will be sent off to a military boarding school, parting the duo - and, worse, disbanding their heavy metal group, Wyld Stallionz - for good. Their last chance to salvage their grades is the final class project, which will be presented in front of the entire school (“San Dimas High School football rules!”), and which they have all of one day left to put together when first we meet them. They meet at Bill’s house to try and study all the history they’ve neglected over the past school year all at once but, between their easy distractibility, obsession with Led Zeppelin, general lack of brain matter, and the seductive distraction of Bill’s step-mother Missy (“I mean, Mom”), the two are basically screwed.

And then the universe, in the form of George Carlin, intervenes.

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K, dude.

Rufus (Carlin) shows up out of nowhere as Bill and Ted are taking a pity-party study break in the parking lot of a convenience store and informs them that they absolutely can not fail their history class, for reasons which he isn’t able to immediately make clear. He then offers them a time-traveling phone booth for the night, so that they can go back through time, learn about history firsthand, and collect historical figures along the way. And as I write all of this out I’m just now realizing that most likely everybody involved in the production of this film was probably very, very high.

Thus begins a journey through world history, from ancient Greece to the early 20th century, as Bill and Ted collect a random assortment of important people (Socrates, Genghis Kahn, Joan of Arc, Napoleon, Beethoven, Abraham Lincoln, Billy the Kid, and Sigmund Freud) and jam them all inside the time-traveling phone booth, so that they can feature them in their final class presentation. Along the way, they also manage to romance two princesses, get into all kinds of historical hijinks, fix the time-traveling telephone booth with wads of gum, escort their motley crew of historical figures through modern-day California - including the San Dimas mall, a bowling alley, and a water park - and find out (from an accidental trip to the future) that one day Wyld Stallionz will be the biggest band in the world and ultimately bring peace and order to the entire universe.

All of which, I’m sure, seemed rather silly and outlandish to my father, but very much appealed on a certain level to the young and very impressionable me, a kid, remember, with a brand new Bon Jovi tape in his coat pocket, and a slowly burgeoning, vaguely defined sense that maybe rock n’roll could really and truly change lives. I was on the cusp of a whole new world, though I surely had very little idea of it at the time; a world where, over the next few years, I would begin to embrace music at a whole new level, slowly leaving behind my youthful infatuation with sports and begrudging weekly piano lessons, trading these things in for a shiny red guitar all of my own and a sudden need to grow out my hair. My dad and I would grow apart during this time: first, an unintentional drift but then, as we all inevitably must during those teenage years, a more purposeful, pronounced shove away.

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure marked the end of something for us, the last in a long line of goofy films we watched together at that theater. Soon, it would no longer be cool to be seen at a movie with your dad. By the next year, I’d be going instead with groups of friends (Home Alone, Nothing But Trouble, The Addams Family), the following year I’d be going on my very first official movie date with a girl (Wayne’s World). And then, just a couple of years later, movies would start to become yet another dividing line between us, as I began tearing through the classics, from Rebel Without a Cause to Pulp Fiction and everything in between. I didn’t want dumb, silly laughs any more but instead wanted, in that desperately urgent teenage way, to be “moved” or “transported” by film “experiences”. There is a good chance I was largely insufferable in these years. I don’t think he knew what to make of any of it.

But for that day, we laughed. The future was distant and our distance still to come. In that moment it was just me and my dad, discovering the silly glory of a surprisingly wonderful film like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, knowing we’d made the right choice (which a years later viewing of The Burbs would ultimately confirm), sharing our favorite lines with each other for the next few weeks, a secret code that my mom and sister could never hope to decipher.

And, though we had already begun to drift apart by the time Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey arrived just two years later (in 1991, otherwise known as the year of Nirvana and the official start of my adolescence), things often have a way of coming full circle if given enough time. As I sit here writing this essay in the final week of April 2011, it has just been announced that a third Bill and Ted film will soon be going into production, with the original stars, some twenty years after the last one was made. In that time, my dad and I have put behind us the distance of those teenage years, and are close once again. We saw a movie together for the first time in years, just the two of us, on Father’s Day last year. And next year, if it’s ready, we’re definitely going to see the new Bill and Ted.

Chad Perman is a writer and the editor-in-chief of this site. He lives in Seattle and, when he gets bored, tries to make things out of other things here.