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Why bill & ted face the music retconned bogus journey's ending.

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Co-creator of the Bill & Ted movies, Ed Solomon, just revealed why the latest movie, Bill & Ted Face the Music , retconned a significant detail from the previous film. The first movie, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures , was released in 1989. The film was such a huge hit commercially and critically, a sequel titled Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey was released two years later. While the latter did not receive as great a response from critics and audiences as the former, Bogus Journey became a cult hit, paving the way for the third entry in the franchise 29 years later .

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures introduced the world to the titular characters, two teenaged slackers. Played by Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter , the movie followed the young boys as they traveled through time for the sake of a high school history presentation. The sequel, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey , raised the stakes as Bill & Ted found themselves dealing with Death in the afterlife. At the end of Bogus Journey , Bill & Ted had young sons of their own named after them. However, the next movie, Bill & Ted Face the Music , changes this detail and the lead characters now have daughters by the names of Billie and Thea.

Related: A Guide To All 113 Times Keanu Reeves Says "Woah!" In Movies 

In an interview with Cinema Blend , Solomon explains the reason why Face the Music retconned the ending of Bogus Journey . He expresses that the original decision to make the children boys was a reflection of Solomon and co-creator Chris Matheson being "barely post-adolescent boys" themselves. Solomon admits that the idea didn't work, coming off as "boring," "derivative," and "stale." Solomon's statement can be found below.

"I’d like to pretend they were always girls. They weren’t always girls. We assumed, because we were adolescent boys when we wrote  Excellent Adventure (and we were barely post-adolescent boys when we wrote  Bogus Journey ), of course, we assumed they were going to be boys. They happened to be played by girls, interestingly. Candace and Lauren Mead played those characters. But regardless, look, we were immature adolescent males. And so we wrote an immature adolescent male fantasy. Thirty years pass. Life changes. The world changes. We change, we grow up, we get married, we have children, we have sons, we have daughters. And of course, our culture evolves, as it should.

But we still, in 2009 and 2010, we thought, ‘Let’s write them as boys.’ Because that’s what we figured! Young Will and Theo. And I cannot tell you how boring they work. Oh God, derivative. Stale. We tried to give them like Bill and Ted type voices. Just unbelievably like rehashed crap. We hated it. We tried to make them into cool guys. That was stupid. And then when we finally had the idea a few years later, ‘Wait, why are we beating our heads against the wall with this? What if they had daughters? What if it’s Billie and Thea?’ It just opened it up completely. So that's a much better idea. And it helped us with something we were trying and to do anyway with the movie, which is -- the first two movies, they are male-centric. They were written by boys who knew no better. And so this also gave us a chance to go, ‘Let’s just widen it, man. Let’s like, let there be more of a female presence and just make it more inclusive.’"

A major detail change like that is certainly understandable, especially given that Bill & Ted's lives are drastically changed from when we last saw them. Face the Music shows the pair in their new roles of domesticated husbands and fathers. However, they haven't entirely lost their essence as they continue to play music together and even insist on going to couples therapy together with their wives. Bill & Ted's lives are interrupted when they learn that they need to create a song that will save the world. With the help of their daughters, who take after their fathers, Bill & Ted travel through time to get musical help, meeting old friends , various musicians, and alternate versions of themselves.

Judging from the trailer , Bill and Ted's daughters, played by Brigette Lundy-Paine and Samara Weaving, appear to fit into the film seamlessly. It looks as though as they go after their fathers, they experience time travel adventures almost identical to their fathers and possibly even meet Bill & Ted's old acquaintance Death. Overall, Bill & Ted Face the Music looks like a cool, nostalgic film with a fun supporting cast and an even more fun soundtrack. The movie will debut in select theaters and through video on demand August 28.

More: Bill & Ted's Wyld Stallyns: The Greatest Band Of All Time Explained 

Source: Cinema Blend

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• Bill and Ted Face the Music

Den of Geek

Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey: Original Ending Revealed

Director Peter Hewitt has been chatting about how the brilliant Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey was originally set to end...

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There are few sequels of the past 30 years or so we love quite as much as Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey , a legitimately excellent and very funny follow-up to Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure .

The movie was directed by Peter Hewitt, taking over from Excellent Adventure ’s Stephen Herek. And he’s been chatting with Bloody Disgusting , along with William Sadler (who, of course, played the Grim Reaper) about the movie. In particular, the ending of the film, which saw Bill & Ted save the world, sing God Gave Rock & Roll To You , and leave us with a montage of newspaper and magazine headlines to fill in the rest of the story.

However, the original title of the film was Bill & Ted Go To Hell , and there’s long been chatter of a different ending to the movie, where the creatures from Hell come to Earth to attack Bill and Ted. Peter Hewitt not only confirmed this was the original plan, but added “it wasn’t a scene, it was the entire ending of the movie. It was a different ending.”

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He explained that “Evil Bill and Ted open their chests and out come these strange cylinders that start to bubble and turn into something. Then, Bill and Ted arrive at the auditorium, the Battle of the Bands, and then their worst fears incarnate arrive. So, a giant Easter bunny arrives and attacks them, granny arrives, Colonel Oats attacks them, and then I can’t remember!”

That said, the film still would have seen Bill and Ted get back in time for the Battle of the Bands, but the darker ending changed. Why? Back to Peter Hewitt…

“We tested it, ’cause the film was shot really quickly and then came out a couple of months later; suddenly it was like we’re six weeks from opening and needed a new ending. So, the whole ending of Bill and Ted building ‘good’ robots to defeat the ‘dad’ robots, that was a new ending; and all the concert stuff was new. Death was in it, but by that time we were finding anything and everything for [William Sadler] to do.”

Rightly so, too. And proof that late reshoots don’t always spell disaster. In good news too, a Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey is getting a Blu-ray release at the end of the month.

Be excellent to each other.

Simon Brew | @SimonBrew

Editor, author, writer, broadcaster, Costner fanatic. Now runs Film Stories Magazine.

‘Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey’ Originally Had a Very Different Ending [Exclusive]

It’s the 25th anniversary of Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey , the memorable follow-up to Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure .

Directed by Peter Hewitt , and featuring a legendary role for William Sadler , this genre comedy broke the mold of sequels by doing something completely different than the first film; in fact, it nearly removed all aspects of time travel. What’s even more of a shocker is that there was even less, according to Hewitt.

Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves return as Bill and Ted, respectively, in a film where evil robots are sent from the future to kill the dynamic duo before they can win the Battle of the Bands. They end up in Hell, coming face-to-face with Satan, as well as their fears incarnate. After challenging Death (Sadler) to a duel, the duo are taken to Heaven where they ask God for help in stopping “the evil robot us’.” They’re directed to an alien being by the name of Station, who builds two “Good” robots to save the day, all of which takes place on stage at Battle of the Bands.

The script was originally titled “ Bill & Ted Go to Hell ,” and unsurprisingly there was a lot more Hell in the screenplay. In fact, Bogus Journey trading cards, an accompanying comic book, and even trailers provided proof of a deleted scene in which the creatures from Hell come to Earth to attack Bill and Ted.

Jon Barkan and I caught up with both Hewitt and Sadler at the Bruce Campbell Horror Film Festival in which they confirmed the existence of such a scene, while also revealing that the entire ending was reshot. While there’s always been chatter of deleted scenes, we were completely unaware that the entire ending of Bogus Journey was retooled, leaving us wondering what the original cut looked like.

When asked about the deleted scene in which Bill and Ted are being chased by their worst fears, Hewitt dropped the bomb: “It wasn’t a scene, it was the entire ending of the movie. It was a different ending.”

“You cut out big scenes in the movie?” a surprised Sadler interrupted.

“Yeah, the whole end.

“Evil Bill and Ted open their chests and out come these strange cylinders that start to bubble and turn into something,” explains Hewitt. “Then, Bill and Ted arrive at the auditorium, the Battle of the Bands, and then their worst fears incarnate arrive. So, a giant easter bunny arrives and attacks them, granny arrives, Colonel Oats attacks them, and then I can’t remember…”

“Do they ever do the Battle of the Bands?” asks Sadler.

“Yeah…yeah,” Hewitt confirms.

“They save the babes…” Sadler notes.

“But then the ending…we tested it,” Hewitt explains, “’cause the film was shot really quickly and then came out a couple of months later; suddenly it was like we’re six weeks from opening and needed a new ending. So, the whole ending of Bill and Ted building ‘Good’ robots to defeat the ‘Bad’ robots, that was a new ending; and all the concert stuff was new. Death was in it, but by that time we were finding anything and everything for you [talking to Sadler] to do.”

A quick search on Google and you’ll find script and video evidence, along with other deleted sequence such as Evil Bill and Ted unzipping to reveal they’ve switched bodies . And while we’ve always known about this chase sequence, we were completely unaware that the entire finale was reshot. This creates so many questions that I wish I were able to ask Hewitt now… If there were no “Good Bill and Ted Robots”, did they ever go to Heaven, and if so, why? Was Station in it? What did they do? Was there any mention of time travel? How did they defeat the Evil Robots and their worst nightmares?

I thought our interview with Hewitt would finally close the door on so many rumors that have persisted over the past 25 years, only it’s perpetuated them even more. I can’t help but wonder what this movie looked like until the reshoots… and with Shout Factory releasing the films on Blu-ray later this month, I expect some new info to be included on it. Too bad the footage allegedly is hard to come by, and Hewitt didn’t take part in the new commentary tracks. This is it folks, probably one of the final interviews with Hewitt regarding Bogus Journey …at least until the 30th anniversary.

Horror movie fanatic who co-founded Bloody Disgusting in 2001. Producer on Southbound, V/H/S/2/3/94, SiREN, Under the Bed, and A Horrible Way to Die. Chicago-based. Horror, pizza and basketball connoisseur. Taco Bell daily. Franchise favs: Hellraiser, Child's Play, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Scream and Friday the 13th. Horror 365 days a year.

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• User reviews

Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey

A tyrant from the future creates evil android doubles of Bill and Ted and sends them back to eliminate the originals. A tyrant from the future creates evil android doubles of Bill and Ted and sends them back to eliminate the originals. A tyrant from the future creates evil android doubles of Bill and Ted and sends them back to eliminate the originals.

• Peter Hewitt
• Chris Matheson
• Keanu Reeves
• Alex Winter
• William Sadler
• 189 User reviews
• 84 Critic reviews
• 61 Metascore
• 1 win & 1 nomination

Top cast 59

• Grim Reaper

• Ms. Wardroe

• (as Amy Stock-Poynton)

• Sir James Martin

• Captain Logan

• Colonel Oats

• Thomas Edison
• (as Hal Landon Sr.)
• Ria Paschelle

• Deputy James

• Mr. Preston
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia Orion Pictures, the film's distributor, was on the verge of bankruptcy months before the release of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991) and was in the process of selling off the rights to several films in an attempt to remain stable. Columbia Pictures looked into acquiring the film, but after careful consideration, Orion kept the film because they had faith in it.
• Goofs When Death falls from the sky after Bill and Ted are resurrected, he hits the ground wearing black and white shoes, when he had been always seen in bare feet.

Grim Reaper : [rapping] You might be a king or a little street sweeper, but sooner or later you dance with the reaper.

[Twirls Scythe over his head and ducks so blade doesn't hit it]

Grim Reaper : Heh heh! Get down with your bad self!

• Crazy credits "Be Excellent to Each Other and Party On."
• Alternate versions The original script had many differences, some that were filmed but cut out. These scenes remain in the novel and comic book adaptions and bits heard in the soundtrack.
• Connections Edited into The Frollo Show: Frollo Misses his Mother (2011)
• Soundtracks The Reaper Written, Performed & Produced by Steve Vai Published by Sy Vy Music / OPC Music Publishing, Inc. Courtesy of Relativity Records

User reviews 189

• GirlwonderReturns
• Oct 26, 2000
• How long is Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey? Powered by Alexa
• Is the "Bill & Ted" series based on a book?
• Where and when does the movie take place?
• Do the Wyld Stallyns really exist?
• July 19, 1991 (United States)
• United States
• United Kingdom
• Bill & Ted Go to Hell
• Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park - 10700 W. Escondido Canyon Rd., Agua Dulce, California, USA (Bill and Ted face Death)
• Nelson Entertainment
• Interscope Communications
• Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $20,000,000 (estimated)
• $38,037,513
• $10,241,268
• Jul 21, 1991
• $38,040,268

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 33 minutes

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Bill and Ted’s Excellent Midlife Crisis

Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are back as the beloved time-traveling duo known for their kindness and decency—just when the world needed them most.

If you hopped inside a telephone booth and traveled back through the space-time continuum to your first encounter with Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure , you might be surprised to discover that its early scenes were, to paraphrase our heroes, totally bogus. In Bill & Ted vernacular, bogus doesn’t mean “counterfeit,” it means “bummer, dude,” and in the original 1989 film, their excellent adventure is set in motion by some seriously dark domestic stuff. Those bits go by fast, though, and they might not have seemed so dark at the time—assuming your first viewing of the smash-hit time-travel comedy (budget: $10 million, box office: $40 million) was closer to the late 1980s than to 2020. It was a different era. Phone booths were everywhere.

Ted’s father is a cop, an angry, belittling police captain, disgusted with his floppy-puppy son and ready to ship him off to military school, where they’ll make a real man out of him, or at least get him away from his nitwit friend Bill. Keanu Reeves was cast as Ted when he was 22 years old, and his tense scenes with Ted’s dad are unsettling to watch now. He doesn’t roll his eyes or fight back—he flinches. Ted’s scared of his father. “When I first played the role,” Reeves told me last week, “I was thinking about this kind of character and personality”—sweet, guileless, harmless—“that’s born out of pain.”

Read: Millennials just ‘get’ Keanu Reeves

Bill’s dad, meanwhile, is a creep. He’s a stubby professor who traded in Bill’s mother for one of his students, a busty, blonde former high-school classmate of Bill’s. He gropes her in front of his son, and throughout their scenes together, Bill, played by Alex Winter, looks as if he’s about to gag. “Your mom’s super hot, dude,” Ted teases him. “ Shut up, Ted ,” Bill seethes, humiliated.

After 31 years, one big-screen sequel ( Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey ), one short-lived animated TV series ( Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventures ), and one sugary breakfast cereal (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Cereal), Bill and Ted are back, and now they’re dads. But when we catch up with William S. Preston, Esq., and Ted “Theodore” Logan in the trilogy’s capstone, Bill & Ted Face the Music , time has done a number on them. Bill has weary, sunken eyes and a dad bod. Ted’s curtains of metal hair are as black as ever, but they’ve crept a bit north on his forehead, as if his mind has been blown too many times. And just as Ted’s father foretold, Bill and Ted have not amounted to anything. Not only did they fail to write the song that would unite the world, as prophesied at the end of Bogus Journey , but pop music has left them in the dust. Their guitar-shredding metal band, Wyld Stallyns, is super lame now. The culture war is over. Bill and Ted lost.

So then why, exactly, are Bill and Ted back? After all, if a song really is waiting to be written in 2020 that can save the entire world, it’s not coming from these two. Bill and Ted aren’t the men for the job, and maybe they never were.

The list of franchises with a decades-long pause between installments is very short. It’s pretty much The Godfather , Indiana Jones … and Bill & Ted . One of these, obviously, is not like the others. And while the first two Bill & Ted installments were hits, they weren’t blockbusters, and they didn’t leave audiences wanting more. By the end of Bogus Journey , we were done with the duo. We bid them a fond adieu and lowered them into the time capsule.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure came out at a moment when America seemed to be in dire need of a crash course on decency and kindness. Voters had sanctioned eight years of the law-and-order conservative Ronald Reagan with the election of the ex-CIA director George Bush, who secured his four years by painting his opponent as a bookish New England pansy who was soft on crime. Wall Street came out in 1987, Michael Douglas won an Oscar in early 1988 for playing Gordon Gekko, and by 1989, when we first met Bill and Ted, greed was officially good. Every kid onscreen was a latchkey kid. Every Hollywood comedy at the time was a divorce comedy, because everyone in America had gotten divorced. It was just what you did after you got married in those days.

The original Bill & Ted movie made Keanu Reeves a star. He was so natural as Ted that many people to this day think the actor is an airhead, rather than the philosopher king he actually is off camera. That same year, he played a doomed lover in 18th-century French royal court, opposite John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Liaisons , but all viewers could see was time-traveling Ted, out of his element yet again. Reeves seemed to connect with Ted on an elemental level. From the start, he saw that Ted was kind of a sad kid beneath his genial surface, and that his insistence on being kind was an act of rebellion against the bully in his house.

“Considering what a light movie it is, and how light it felt to us to create it, there’s actually a lot of darkness and pain in it,” said the film’s co-screenwriter Chris Matheson during a three-way phone interview with his longtime writing partner, Ed Solomon.

Tyrannical police captains and lecherous professors don’t play on-screen today the way they used to. They represent a whole power structure now, and as a society, we’ve grown more wise to the systems of permission that protect men like them. Back in the ’80s, though, Bill’s and Ted’s dads were just garden-variety crummy fathers. They didn’t represent anything. Matheson and Solomon weren’t trying to inject social commentary. In that era of Hollywood, broken families and toxic masculinity were less than subtext, they were just there —omnipresent, barely acknowledged. When you watch Bill’s and Ted’s scenes with their fathers now, though, that’s all you can see.

Matheson and Solomon were the original Bill and Ted, and the floral elocution the inventors imagined for their characters was a pastiche of Peter Sellers, Damon Runyon, and the sunny SoCal drawl of San Dimas, where high-school football ruled. Excellent Adventure ’s most iconic line, “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K,” is practically iambic pentameter. The way Bill and Ted talk to each other is the music of their friendship, which in turn remains the core of their enduring appeal—their bottomless affection for each other, their openhearted faith that simply being nice will fix everything.

That theory has taken some hits in recent years. American faith in the power of decency, in fact, might be at its lowest-ever ebb. Matheson and Solomon didn’t set out to write a movie for our times—the ball got rolling more than a decade ago over a nostalgic dinner with Reeves and Winter, they told me. “But nobody really seemed interested until just a few years ago,” Solomon said.

“Maybe we were lucky that the movie took this long,” he went on. “Because it does feel like, if there’s any time for a couple of guys who sincerely believe in the need to be excellent to each other, now is definitely that time.”

The new film opens with what may be Wyld Stallyns’ final gig: a wedding uniting Bill’s and Ted’s families in very unholy matrimony. Here at the end of the trilogy, the Preston and Logan patriarchs are facing some music too. In a speech to the wedding party, their sons fill us in on all the intra-family shagging since the end of Bogus Journey : Bill’s ex-classmate stepmother wound up leaving Bill’s father for Ted’s father, whom she then left for Ted’s brother.

In the original, Excellent Adventure , the father-son scenes aren’t funny. If there are any laughs, they’re nervous ones. Even Ted’s wisecrack about Bill’s stepmom is a little below the belt for Bill & Ted . In Face the Music , the transgressions of Bill’s and Ted’s boomer-era dads are not just played for laughs—they’re the punch line. The beautiful union they are here to celebrate, Bill notes cheerfully from the stage, “makes Ted his own uncle!” And more excellently, Ted points out, it “makes my dad his own son!” Everyone guffaws. Mr. Preston is still a bully, but now he comes off more like an old man shouting at a cloud. Pop culture has spent the intervening decades learning that you defang bullies by turning them into the butt of the joke.

At some point in Bill and Ted’s post-phenomenon phase, when the franchise was settling into a nice retirement as a beloved artifact of its very specific era, the series’ creators finally realized that Bill and Ted do not have mothers, and that their absence is never explained. In fact, the movie featured no notable female characters, period. The only two in the whole saga (besides Joan of Arc, who got to say a few lines in French) were the two bodacious princesses from medieval England whom Bill and Ted smuggled back to the present, like a matching set of interstellar mail-order brides. Not exactly a progressive plotline for the #MeToo era. “Bill and Ted were adolescent boys and written by adolescent boys,” Solomon said, “because Chris and I were essentially adolescent boys.” It was time to grow up.

Matheson and Solomon got married, had kids, had successes and failures, then got older some more and began confronting the ways that their lives, for better and for worse, didn’t go how they’d planned. They got wise about their privilege, in life and in Hollywood. They reflected on how and why it was possible for them to have a hit franchise without noticing they forgot to put any women in it. And along the way, they processed the bittersweet truth that a more just, more equal future would mean less room for aging white male comedy writers like them. Each passing year, the idea of catching up with Bill and Ted, and exploring how they navigated those same challenges, the same feelings of obsolescence, made them laugh harder. It also started to sound like a movie. What if Bill and Ted were lost, adrift, searching for purpose in a fast-changing world? What if they were jolted by a crisis, something that forced them to get their shit together before it was too late? And what if their journey mirrored that of their co-creators—what if their time was up, but they didn’t know it yet?

What if middle age, in other words, had turned Bill and Ted into the perfect comic heroes for Donald Trump’s America: just two more mediocre men who think they are destined to save the world.

At the very end of Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey , our dear boys become fathers. It’s the resolution to an existential plotline with nods to Ingmar Bergman: Bill and Ted get murdered by evil Bill and Ted and must defeat the Grim Reaper in a series of board games to escape back to the world of the living; Bill’s and Ted’s ex-royal wives give birth to children named, naturally, Bill and Ted. Viewers are left to assume that the young Bill and Ted are boys—which is what Matheson and Solomon, who wrote the scene, imagined as well—and that everyone lived happily ever after.

When we meet baby Bill and baby Ted in Face the Music , though, they are now young women named Billie and Theodora—daughters forged in their fathers’ image: sunny and generous, best friends for life, but also jobless and adrift. They’ve inherited their dads’ passion for music, but unlike Bill and Ted, whose teenage tastes were narrow and parochial (white), Billie and Thea’s knowledge is diverse and encyclopedic. They’re big fans of the pan flute, Mongolian throat singing, and the phrases of Coltrane. Their love for music is openhearted, and open-minded. (Their names are also reversed: Billie is Ted’s daughter; Thea is Bill’s.)

“We came from a time when there was metal and hair bands, and that’s no longer here,” Winter told me. “Now we live in a culture where, because of technology, everything is available at all times. I thought the writers handled that in a really clever way, by having our daughters really interested in … a mash-up of different styles. That’s the world our daughters are coming from.” (The generational gracenotes include a third daughter character: Kristen Schaal co-stars as the child of Rufus, Bill and Ted’s father figure from the future, who was played by the late George Carlin.)

Over the course of Face the Music , while their dads scour the future for versions of themselves who don’t wind up divorced losers (no such luck), Billie and Thea travel back in time to help out their dads by assembling the greatest backing band of all time, a repeat of the historical scavenger hunt from Excellent Adventure , only this time with a risky whiff of cultural appropriation. You might wince as Billie and Thea collect Louis Armstrong first, then Jimi Hendrix, but their efforts build to a worthy purpose, and the scenes glide by thanks to the breezy chemistry of Samara Weaving, who plays the stoner savant Thea, and Brigette Lundy-Paine, the nonbinary actor who does a spot-on Ted 2.0 as Billie.

Middle-aged Bill’s and Ted’s exasperated wives, meanwhile, are forced into a reckoning of their own. Their sweet adoring husbands, bless their hearts, are turning into houseplants, and their friendship has gone way past co-dependent. The four of them even do couples therapy together. (Bill: “We’re a couple of couples!”) For so long, their husbands have been trying, and failing, to write the song that saves the world, but saving the world is so last century. This time around, Bill and Ted need to save their marriages first.

Or as Reeves put it to me, they need to start giving their family the same love and support they give their friendship. In the film’s early scenes, Reeves went on, “the daughters are helping to support Bill and Ted. The wives are supporting.” Along the way, the men learn to flip the script. “We’re trying to be better for them.” The movie’s parallel plots, in which their daughters race back in time to collect their all-star lineup, and their wives search the future for signs of happiness with their husbands, converge on Bill and Ted and force them to confront the real conundrum in their lives: Now what?

Bill & Ted Face the Music is very funny, and very sweet, and yes, I may have even cried a little at the end. It strikes a deeper chord than the first two movies, though, because it’s about something real. It’s about what happens when Bills and Teds, and Billies and Theas, are nurtured as kids, encouraged to hurl themselves into their passions, and taught to be excellent to one another along the way. That’s the journey this time—finding your purpose in life and accepting that it might be more humble than the High Council had led you to believe. That your true purpose might be to serve someone else’s purpose.

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Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey

There were parts of “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” I probably didn’t understand, but that’s all right, because there were even more parts that Bill and Ted didn’t understand. This is a movie that thrives on the dense-witted idiocy of its characters, two teenage dudes who go on amazing journeys through time and space with only the dimmest perception that they are not still playing video games.

I missed the enormously popular movie that introduced these characters, “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” and felt myself blessed at the time. But now I’m not so sure. Their “Bogus Journey” is a riot of visual invention and weird humor that works on its chosen sub-moronic level, and on several others as well, including some fairly sophisticated ones. It’s the kind of movie where you start out snickering in spite of yourself, and end up actually admiring the originality that went into creating this hallucinatory slapstick.

The movie begins far in the future, where students at Bill & Ted’s University have the opportunity to chat personally with Thomas Edison and Beethoven, and to study such artistic classics as the “ Star Trek ” TV series. An evil overlord of time, named De Nomolos and played by that gravel-voiced, white-haired villain Joss Ackland , vows to rewrite history by destroying Bill and Ted (played as before by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves ). He has invented robots that look and act exactly like the two heroes, and are just as dumb, and he sends them rocketing back through time in a telephone booth.

Bill and Ted are meanwhile trying to win a rock band contest with their own group, the Wyld Stallyons, which includes a couple of girl musicians they picked up in the 15th century. Startled by the appearance of their robot-doubles, they commence their own journeys through time and space in a desperate attempt to destroy them, save themselves, preserve the book of history, stay cool, and meet cute chicks.

The funniest thing that happens to them is their showdown with the Grim Reaper ( William Sadler ), who looks just as he does in Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal.” In that film (as most of the audience for this one will probably not know), Death played chess with a medieval knight, with the knight’s soul at stake. This time the dudes challenge the Reaper to a pocket video game, and beat him, even after he tries to weasel out with an offer of best of three.

Death, having lost, has to accompany Bill and Ted on their journey and do what they tell him, and this leads to some of the funniest moments I have seen in any movie in a long time, including one where the Reaper does a little comparison shopping for scythes at the hardware store.

One of the stops on the bogus journey is Heaven, created with great imagination and a lot of light and echoing sound effects and a most peculiar conversation with the Deity. Bill ands Ted handle this summit meeting, as they handle everything else in the film, like two dudes for whom “Pee Wee’s Playhouse” would be too slow and intellectual.

All of the actors (including George Carlin , who turns up in an important supporting role) have a lot of fun with this material, and it turns into more delicate fun, based on more subtle timing, than you might imagine. Many of Sadler’s laughs as the Grim Reaper come from simple physical cringing, as he conveys his embarrassment and lost dignity.

Of Bill and Ted, I can say that I have not seen Alex Winter much before (he was in “ Rosalie Goes Shopping “), but I have seen Keanu Reeves in vastly different roles (the FBI man in the current “Point Break,” for example), and am a little astonished by the range of these performances. Like Sean Penn , who immortalized the word “awesome” in a Bill & Ted-like performance in “ Fast Times at Ridgemont High ,” he brings more artistry to this cretinous role than might at first meet the eye.

Who is the movie intended for? Your basic “Bill & Ted” audience, for starters — upward-bound young moviegoers looking for something one notch more challenging than “ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles .” But also for lovers of fantasy, whimsy, and fanciful special effects. This movie is light as a feather and thin as ice in spring, but what it does, it does very nicely.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

• George Carlin as Rufus
• Keanu Reeves as Ted
• William Sadler as Grim Reaper
• Alex Winter as Bill
• Joss Ackland as De Nomolos
• Chris Matheson
• David Finfer
• David Newman

Photographed by

• Oliver Wood

Directed by

• Peter Hewitt

Produced by

• Scott Kroopf

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13 Excellent Facts About Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey

Writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon invented the characters William "Bill" S. Preston, Esq. and Ted "Theodore" Logan way back in 1983 , while performing improv with their UCLA classmates. Two years after Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure hit theaters in 1989, Matheson and Solomon decided to put their creations in front of brand new hurdles and challenges in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey , a sequel that some regard as the superior movie of the two. In the latter, our heroes are murdered by their evil robot selves from the future and must go through hell and heaven to get their vengeance. Here are some facts about the film, which was released 25 years ago today.

1. ORION PICTURES INITIALLY INSISTED ON BILL AND TED KIDNAPPING CHARACTERS FROM FAMOUS BOOKS.

While Matheson and Solomon wanted to write about Bill and Ted dying and going to hell, the studio wanted the leads to enter famous works of literature to pass an English test. "The literature idea sounds different from time travel," Solomon said , "but it ends up being the same thing: Bill and Ted go into historical settings and meet famous characters, except now the characters are fictional." The two tried to write that version before telling Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter their initial idea, which the actors preferred. Reeves and Winter told the studio that Matheson and Solomon's movie was the one they wanted to make.

2. IT WAS PETER HEWITT'S FEATURE DIRECTORIAL DEBUT.

Despite never having directed a feature film, British director Peter Hewitt beat out 50 other directors for the chance to replace Excellent Adventure director Stephen Herek (who directed 1991's Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead instead). "To this day I don’t know why," Hewitt admitted in a 1992 interview . "I think I never imagined they’d consider me so I decided to say exactly what I thought about their script ideas: what I didn’t like and would want to change as much as what I wanted left in to build on. Perhaps they admired my honesty and the fact I wasn’t scared to speak my mind."

Though he had never directed a feature film, Hewitt had plenty of veteran help. Special effects supervisor Richard Yuricich ( Close Encounters of the Third Kind , Blade Runner ) teamed up with Kevin Yagher, who designed the Chucky doll in Child’s Play (1988) and who was also responsible for designing and applying make-up in three of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, to help Hewitt execute Matheson and Solomon's vision.

3. PRODUCTION WAS DELAYED TO ACCOMMODATE KEANU REEVES' BUSY SCHEDULE.

Orion wanted the film to be released in the summer of 1991, but the 10-week shoot had to be delayed until January 7, 1991. Reeves couldn't make it until then because he was working on My Own Private Idaho (1991). They stuck to the 10-week schedule by editing the movie as they went along, shooting five days a week and editing on Saturdays.

4. THE ORIGINAL TITLE WAS BILL & TED GO TO HELL , WHICH POSED A MARKETING PROBLEM.

Producer Scott Kroopf explained to The New York Times why they ultimately decided against using a title with the word 'hell' in it: "The problem was—and it was a real one—we couldn't advertise on TV until after 9 o'clock."

5. THE WRITERS FOUND THEIR WAY INTO THE FILM.

Solomon (with glasses) and Matheson (white shirt) appear as New Agers at Missy's seance. The Nomolos in the character name of the evil Chuck De Nomolos is Solomon spelled backwards.

6. THEY KNEW THEY WERE PARODYING INGMAR BERGMAN AND THE SEVENTH SEAL .

"The biggest set piece in the movie is that in order to get back to life, Bill and Ted have to play Death in games," Kroopf explained . "And the games they play are Battleship , Clue , Twister . So your life is on the line; you're playing with Death, but you're playing games that Bill and Ted know how to play. This is a clear parody of Bergman."

7. WILLIAM SADLER HELPED WITH SOME OF THE LINES.

"I think I had more fun doing Bill and Ted than I’ve ever had making anything I’ve ever shot," William Sadler, who played the Grim Reaper, said in 2015 . "It was, once I came up with the Czechoslovakian accent and had the funny make-up done, and the idea that he’s almost effeminate. He starts off as a scary dude and almost immediately it all unravels and he becomes this kind of insecure doofus who all he really wants is for them to like him. At the end it was so sweet. I also got to be creative, I wrote the Reaper Rap. I kept having ideas, like when he goes by—I said to Peter Hewitt the director, 'Wouldn’t it be great if he walks past somebody who’s smoking and says ‘See you real soon’ as he goes by, and the person who’s smoking goes ah and puts it out?’ Peter liked the idea and said bring the camera over here, that’s Peter Hewitt as the smoker. We didn’t have an actor to play it, the idea happened on the set, while we were shooting other stuff."

8. THERE WERE STAR TREK CONNECTIONS.

Bill & Ted University was at the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys, California. It was later used for Starfleet Academy in Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001). Bill & Ted give Death a melvin at Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park near Agua Dulce Springs. It was shot there because shooting the scene in Utah was too expensive. When Hewitt first came across the jagged rock at Vasquez he turned to his first assistant director and said , "Isn’t this the alien planet in every Star Trek episode?" Hewitt rented a VHS of the "Arena" episode from the original series, froze the shot, and worked out the exact place for the crew to place the camera.

9. THERE WAS A CIRCULAR MOTIF THROUGHOUT THE MOVIE.

Production designer David L. Snyder and Hewitt worked it out so that 25 sets were built on three soundstages and other outside locations, each with circular shapes . "I chose a through-line of curves and circles in a desperate need to tie it all up stylistically," Hewitt explained . "Each place is instantly recognizable, but not stereotypically otherworldly. Otherwise Bill and Ted would have had to have said at some stage, ‘Where are we?,’ as they aren’t the smartest guys in the world."

10. AN ALTERNATE ENDING INVOLVING A CAR CHASE BETWEEN BILL AND TED AND THEIR BIGGEST FEARS WAS CUT.

Alex Winter said it was "insanely funny." It was storyboarded . To get rid of their reanimated "Personal Hells," Bill gives his Granny a kiss on the cheek, Ted calls his brother and apologizes for stealing his Easter candy, and both of them are nice to Colonel Oats.

In the original ending, Bill and Ted brought themselves back from the future every minute for 10 years to make full armies of themselves. Preview audiences didn't like it , and a new ending was shot over 10 days.

11. THE DIRECTOR'S CUT WAS MUCH DARKER.

Hewitt claimed the first cut of Bogus Journey was much darker . "That’s a definite British trait," he added. "The humor was black comedy almost. The Evil Us’s were really evil! I went for it and had them running riot doing despicable things. But test screen audiences couldn’t take it ... My original cut would have played well in Britain."

12. JOSS ACKLAND REGRETS BEING IN IT.

Joss Ackland played Chuck De Nomolos. He said that many of the roles in his 50-plus-year acting career were taken just for the money or to settle bets . "I do an awful lot of crap, but if it's not immoral, I don't mind," he explained. "I'm a workaholic." As for Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey ? "I can't tell you how embarrassing that was," he told BBC News .

13. ALEX WINTER SAID A THIRD MOVIE IS COMING SOON.

In April 2016, Winter said that a third film was imminent—and that both he and Reeves would be reprising their roles: “We have a script, we have a director, we have a studio—we’re just trying to nail down a start date.”

How Did Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey Originally End With a Killer Easter Bunny?

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MOVIE URBAN LEGEND : Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey originally had a drastically different ending involving a giant demonic Easter Bunny.

The original Bill & Ted film, 1989's Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure , starred Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves as the titular Bill and Ted, who are in danger of failing history (and if that happens, Ted's father plans to send him to military school under Colonel Oats). Luckily, through the use of a time machine and an excellent adventure through time, they end up doing such an amazing history project that they pass easily. At the end of the movie, they discover what we knew from the beginning, that the mysterious Rufus (George Carlin) who sent them on this journey through time via a time machine in the form of a phone booth (a time booth, as it were) was doing so specifically to maintain his idyllic future, a future that relied on Bill and Ted staying together and forming a rock band that would change the world.

In 1991, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey was released, and this time, instead of time travel, Bill and Ted are instead dealing with death itself! Or, well, Death himself, at least. A citizen from the future who hates that society has been built around these two airheads goes back in time to ruin everything. He shows up with evil robot versions of Bill and Ted and they kill the real Bill and Ted, and the pair end up in hell (after first trying to escape from Death when Death offers to play them in a game for their lives, a la the game of chess the knight has with Death in the classic film, The Seventh Seal ).

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WHY IS THERE AN EASTER BUNNY IN HELL?

While in hell, Bill and Ted invidivually (and then Bill and Ted together) face the possible eternal punishments that they will receive in hell. For Bill, it is his grandmother. When he was a little kid, his grandmother scared him, but since she wanted a kiss, his family forced him to kiss her even though it disgusted him and traumatized him. For Ted, it was stealing his brother's Easter basket when they were little. The Easter basket torment is personified with a demonic Easter Bunny voiced by the brilliant Frank Welker...

Together, the pair are also tormented by Colonel Oats (as Ted's father, who had agreed not to send Ted to military school after Bill and Ted aced their history project, noted to Ted that military school was still a possibility). Oats was played by the great actor, Chelcie Ross (perhaps best known as the coach in Rudy and as the veteran pitcher in Major League. Ross actually served in the Air Force during the Vietnam War and was awarded a Bronze Star)...

Eventually, Bill and Ted escape hell by taking Death up on his offer to play them in a game, only they surprise him by challenging him to a series of modern games like Battleship and Twister and they beat him repeatedly and he ultimately allows them to return to life. They team up with some good robot versions of Bill and Ted who defeat the evil versions of Bill and Ted and ultimately, they go back in time to learn how to rock and use that knowledge to livestream to the world their Battle of the Bands-winning performance.

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WHAT WAS THE ORIGINAL ENDING OF BILL & TED'S BOGUS JOURNEY?

First off, Bill and Ted were not originally done with their versions of hell so easily. You see, at first, their worst nightmares (the Easter Bunny, Colonel Oats and Bill's grandmother) followed them from hll and faced them in the real world. The Easter Bunny was now very large and Bill's grandmother was quite demonic looking. The scenes made their way into the trading card set for the movie...

In Evan Dorkin's comic book adaptation of the movie (based on the original script), he drew an outstanding scene featurng the three demons...

Things are going really poorly for Bill and Ted. The Easter Bunny is MENACE!

Ultimately, they realize that they need to just confront their fears and Bill needs to just kiss his grandmother and Ted needs to call his brother and apologize...

They then "kill" Colonel Oats with kindness and that defeats him, as well, as he realizes that he is cruel to hide his own insecurities.

The ending then originally involved Bill and Ted sending their good robots to save the babes, but they semingly run off. Then, Bill and Ted are killed again by the evil Bill and Ted robots...

But you see, since they beat Death so many times, that means he owes them a few extra resurrections, and so he brings them back to life and they decapitiate their evil robot doubles...

This, too, made its way into the trading card set for the movie...

Then it turns out that the good robots had raced around the entire world to build up enough momentum to crash through a wall to save Bill and Ted's fiancees...

This ending just didn't test well, so the filmmakers threw together the ending that is in the actual film.

Man, Evan Dorkin is awesome, right?

The legend is...

STATUS : True

Thanks to my pal, Loren Collins, for suggesting this one a while back (I'd prefer not to admit HOW long "a while" is). And thanks to the awesome Bill and Ted fan site that featured the images above that is now sadly defunct, or else I would send you folks there to check it all out.

Be sure to check out my archive of Movie Legends Revealed for more urban legends about the world of film.

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is [email protected].

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Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey (1991)

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Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey

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For many years now, at Bill and Ted University of the future, the people of the world have been excellent to each other. But fed-up with Bill and Ted's peaceful world and even more fed up with heavy metal, Chuck De Nomolos decides to do something about it. De Nomolos creates cyborg versions of Bill and Ted, who travel back to 1990 with orders to kill the human versions of Bill and Ted, win the Battle of the Bands, and pave the way for De Nomolos to take over the future. In 1990, Bill and Ted are sent to hell by the cyborgs. Cyborg Bill and cyborg Ted make time with the real Bill and Ted's girlfriends Joanna and Elizabeth and prepare to take the human Bill and Ted's place in the Battle of the Bands. With the help of their friend Rufus, the human Bill and Ted are forced to find a way out of hell, deal with the Grim Reaper, and talk to God himself, in their mission to get to the Battle of the Bands and stop the two cyborgs.

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How ‘Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey’ Became a Most Excellent Sequel

Since the beginning of time, or at least 1991, there's been a debate stirring among movie fans: Is Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey better than the original Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure ? The answer, followed by a celebratory air-guitar riff, is a resounding yes.

The sequel was released three years after   Bill and Ted's first excellent adventure, and it surpasses its predecessor in almost every way. The story is better, the direction is more accomplished and it includes a far more bodacious collection of gags, special appearances, film homages and early '90s pop culture references.

The story takes place two years after the original. Since the events of the first movie, Bill ( Alex Winter ) and Ted ( Keanu Reeves ) have graduated from high school and are working at a place called Pretzel & Cheese. They're trying to get up the nerve to propose to their girlfriends, while also getting ready for what they hope will be a victory for their group Wyld Stallyns in an upcoming battle of the bands. But their plans are threatened by a former gym teacher and sit-up-champion-turned-evil-mastermind-from-the-future Chuck De Nomolos (played by Joss Ackland, memorable for his turn as the malevolent Arjen Rudd in Lethal Weapon II ).

To defeat Bill and Ted, De Nomolos sends a pair of evil Bill and Ted robots – who look identical to the real thing – back in time (an obvious riff on 1984's The Terminator ) . The robots accomplish this by throwing the boys off the Vasquez Rocks outcropping outside of Los Angeles, famous as the setting of the 1967 "Arena" episode of Star Trek , in which Captain Kirk defeats the reptilian Gorn. (Bill and Ted watch this episode earlier in the movie.)

Now dead, Bill and Ted encounter the Grim Reaper (William Sadler, memorable for his role as Heywood in The Shawshank Redemption ). After a brief sojourn in hell, which includes riffs on everything from the 1921 German expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Clive Barker's 1987 Hellraiser, Bill and Ted challenge Death to a contest. It's a play on Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film The Seventh Seal , but instead of chess, the contest consists of Battleship, Clue, Electric Football and Twister. After his defeat, Death becomes Bill and Ted's partner, and eventually ends up playing bass in their band.

To defeat the evil robot versions of themselves, Bill and Ted decide they need divine help, so they get Death to take them to heaven. At the pearly gates, they encounter the Gatekeeper, played by blues artist Taj Mahal, and quote lyrics from Poison 's 1988 hit "Every Rose Has Its Thorn," winning their way into heaven. They meet an alien there named Station, who's playing charades with Ben Franklin and Albert Einstein.

Station helps Bill and Ted build good robot versions of themselves, which they take to the battle of the bands to defeat the evil robots. After a final encounter with De Nomolos, they win the battle of the bands by playing a rendition of Kiss ' "God Gave Rock 'N' Roll to You II" (with added guitar work by Steve Vai ), during which Bill is dressed up like a member of ZZ Top and Ted is dressed like Vai himself. The band they defeat is Primus; the MC of the event is played by Pam Grier (memorable for her role in Quentin Tarantino 's 1997 Jackie Brown , which in turn referenced her storied '70s blaxploitation career). At the end of the movie, Grier unzips herself to reveal that she's actually George Carlin – reprising his character Rufus from the Bill and Ted film – who has been helping the boys all along.

Watch 'Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey' Trailer

As if all this isn't enough,  Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey includes an appearance by Faith No More guitarist Jim Martin, references to The Exorcist , a gag in which Bill's stepmom has divorced his dad and married Ted's dad, scenes taking place at the same mall where the DeLorean-tracks-of-fire scene from Back to the Future was shot and a sequence filmed at the Tillman water reclamation plant in Van Nuys, which has served as the setting for the Starfleet Academy in various Star Trek spin-offs.

It also features one of the all-time greatest onscreen impersonations of Reeves, performed by Hal Landon Jr. as Ted's father in a scene where he's possessed by Ted's ghost. Landon gets everything about Reeves right - from the way he holds his head pulled back from his shoulder to the elbows-in-hands-out way he holds his arms. Like so much of Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey , the performance serves as a parody inside a parody of a parody, and works because of its entertainment value and self-deprecation.

In the end, it's not only this awareness of its own ridiculousness that makes the movie so charming; it's also the ability with which it's made. While it features almost none of the time-travel and historical-figure shenanigans of the original, the sheer volume of silly references, director Pete Hewitt's visual and storytelling talents and the full commitment of the cast make up for this absence. In retrospect, it's clear that while Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure may have invented the characters and conceit,  Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey perfected it.

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Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey

The popularity of the first Bill & Ted film prompted Nelson and Orion to release a sequel two years later. Chuck De Nomolos (Joss Ackland), a rebel from Rufus's utopian future, wants to replace it with a militaristic Crapsack World . He plans to accomplish this by sending Evil Robot duplicates into the past, where they will kill the boys, then deliver a disparaging speech worldwide at a "Battle of the Bands" concert contest and destroy Wyld Stallyns' reputation forever.

With a minimum amount of effort, the robots succeed in killing off the two title characters. However, their spirits refuse to go quietly into the good night and face off against the Grim Reaper ( William Sadler ). While the evil robots make time with the guys' princess babes, the ghosts of Bill and Ted need to find a way to resurrect themselves, defeat the evil robot "usses" and stop Chuck De Nomolos. To do so, they must go through Heaven and Hell (literally, plus Kirk's Rock ) to face their personal demons and gather allies to their cause.

The second movie features the following totally metal tropes:

• Achievements in Ignorance : It's indicated in the ending montage that Death somehow won the Indy 500. On foot. ("I didn't know I could run that fast.")
• All Part of the Show : Everyone not directly involved thinks that the climactic battle is just a really elaborate stage show.
• And That's Terrible : Bill and Ted have to mug some people in Heaven, and they admit it was not a good thing.
• Artistic License – Space : The picture that accompanies the "Wyld Stallyns to Play Mars" has a picture of Jupiter's moon Io.
• Artistic License – Sports : The aforementioned Grim Reaper winning the Indy 500 on foot .
• Back from the Dead : Evil Robot Bill & Ted kill the originals, but they eventually come back to life after beating Death in a number of board games .
• Badass Creed : De Nomolos and his followers have a pretty impressive villainous one: "What is the fuel?" " FEAR! " "What is the engine?" " DISCIPLINE! " "What is the ideal?" " ORDER! " "And how do we achieve it?" " DEATH TO BILL AND TED! "
• Big Red Devil : The duo flag the attention of a gigantic one in Hell who sends them to live their own personal Hells.
• Bound and Gagged : The princesses by the Evil Robot Bill & Ted near the end, along with Unwilling Suspension since they're goign to drop them from the rafters after the show ends.
• Burger Fool : Off-screen, Bill and Ted work for "Pretzels and Cheese" in order to support the band.
• Butt-Monkey : Death of all people. He is repeatedly humiliated, first when Bill and Ted wedgie him to escape. Then he undergoes a series of embarrassing defeats at board games, is forced to appear before God in drag, suffers repeated comedic injuries on Earth, and finally he can't even catch a break when he becomes part of the band that saves the world. His solo albums fail spectacularly, and was also part of a lip-sync scandal. At least he won the Indianapolis 500 .
• The time machine arrives outside the Circle K, as in the first film, though without any particular reason this time (indeed, it's a different Circle K).
• Bill and Ted initially assume that the robots are future versions of themselves, referencing when they crossed paths with themselves in the first film.
• After Missy divorces Bill's father and marries Ted's, Bill can't think of anything to say, so he just repeats his Running Gag "Shut up, Ted" line from the first movie.
• Bill calls the evil robots dickweeds for killing them, referencing when Bill called a knight a "medieval dickweed" for apparently killing Ted.
• When Bill and Ted try to plead for their lives and tell the evil robots that they love them, the robots call them "fags," a callback to the first film, when Bill and Ted embrace, then call each other "fag."
• The boys again quote metal lyrics when asked to say something profound.
• When the camera pans down from the Builder's Emporium sign, you can see a sign further down for Oshman's Sporting Goods- the store that Genghis Khan "totally ravaged" at the mall in the first movie.
• The climax is again resolved by planning to go back in time to set things up after the climax is resolved.
• The Cameo : A number of musicians have cameos, including the members of Primus as themselves, "Big" Jim Martin of Faith No More playing himself Etc.  referred to as "Sir James Martin of the Faith No More Spiritual and Theological centre" , and bluesman Taj Mahal as heaven's gatekeeper.
• Celebrities Hang Out in Heaven : When Bill, Ted, and Death go to heaven to meet the universe's greatest inventor, they find Confucius , Benjamin Franklin , Albert Einstein , and George Washington playing charades with Station. Someone can also be heard asking " Marilyn " how she got into show business.
• Chess with Death : Parodied by having Bill and Ted best Death in a number of modern party and board games until he finally admits defeat.
• Confusing Multiple Negatives : When made to believe that the princesses have broken up with them, Bill describes the situation as "non-non-heinous", i.e., heinous. He later calls his personal hell "non-non-non-non-heinous" which, yes, still adds up to heinous.
• Counter Zany : "How do we defeat evil robot usses?" "By building good robot usses to fight them!"
• Covers Always Lie : Parodied when Bill and Ted complain that rock albums inaccurately portrayed Hell. "We got totally lied to by our album covers, man."
• Creation Sequence : Station assembles the Good Robot Usses in the back of a moving van.
• The credits describe the crew as "awesome", "bodacious", etc.
• Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon appear as the two male members of the seance.
• Director Peter Hewitt appears as the smoker at the hardware shop whom Death talks to.
• Crystal Spires and Togas : Subverted, as we learn that not everyone is happy to live in a future founded by a pair of hard rockers.
• Curb-Stomp Battle : The "Good Robot Usses" created by Station own the "Bad Robot Usses" created by Chuck De Nomolos. They uppercut their heads off their bodies, and a follow-up punch to the torso causes them to explode. Surprisingly the Bad Robot Usses are perfectly ok with this. Evil Ted: Dude, we may have met our match! Evil Bill: Kudos to you, good human usses!
• Darker and Edgier : As is evident by the titles. Whilst Excellent Adventure is a feel-good romp, Bogus Journey has the title characters a) facing robot terrorists from the future and b) dying and going to hell , even if it is still played for laughs and they get better eventually.
• Death Is Gray : After Bill and Ted are thrown off a cliff by their evil robot twins, they appear as ghosts with gray skin.
• Defeat Means Friendship : After having lost every game to Bill and Ted, Death becomes their ally who also has to obey their orders.
• Despite having a number of lines in the first film, Bill's dad only has a single reaction shot in which he looks forlornly at Missy.
• Ted's little brother Deacon had a substantial sideplot in the first film, but never shows up in the sequel. He's acknowledged only in Ted's personal Hell, when Ted steals an Easter basket with Deacon's name on it.
• Bill & Ted in between the time they die and go to Hell. At times you can tell they're just wearing grey paint and greyscale versions of their clothing.
• Also with Colonel Oats in hell.
• It turns out that Death is actually a pretty nice guy once you get to know him, and the climax of the movie has him joining Bill and Ted's band.
• Bill and Ted also have a rather casual conversation with God just before returning to the living world.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu? : When Bill & Ted are cast into an underground maze of doors containing their worst fears by the Devil, Ted is unimpressed by the big guy's taunts... The Devil: Choose your eternity! (evil laugh) Dead Ted: Choose your own, you FAG !! The Devil: (angry roar) (Ted is sent flying into a wall)
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu? : "I can't believe we Melvined Death!" (high five)
• Do Not Adjust Your Set : De Nomolos commandeers the world's televisions to deliver his evil speech.
• Don't Fear the Reaper : Bad attitude? Yes! Evil? No! Combines with Waxing Lyrical after the two beat Death and he has to lead them to Heaven. Dead Bill: Hey, Ted — Don't Fear the Reaper ! Death: I heard that!
• Drill Sergeant Nasty : Colonel Oats, the head and namesake of Oats Military Academy where Ted's dad is threatening to send him in the first movie. He's only mentioned in the first film; we first meet him in the sequel at a party and he's still offering a place for Ted at the academy . However, when the duo goes to hell, the first punishment they go through is being at military school where he's this trope in full force and demands that they "get down and give me infinity". Then again, they are in HELL...
• Earth Is the Center of the Universe : Mocked when Bill and Ted ask God for help in protecting their girlfriends, and are sent to meet the smartest man in the universe... who turns out to be two squat, large-nosed Martians. Or one big one, depending... Death: Did you assume that the most brilliant scientist in the entire universe would be from Earth ?
• Embarrassing First Name : At the end of the film, De Nomolos' first name is revealed as "Chuck". Which isn't really that bad a name, unless you're trying to be an Evil Overlord .
• Evil Knockoff : The duo's evil robot duplicates from the future.
• Evil Mentor : Subverted with De Nomolos, although the viewers are meant to think he was this to Rufus for most of the film. Rufus calls him "my old teacher" in the opening scene and the villain responds by calling him "my favorite pupil." Rufus later explains at the end of the film that De Nomolos was actually his old gym teacher.
• Evil Wears Black : De Nomolos and his soldiers all wear black.
• Exact Words : Just before using the Good Robot Usses to destroy the Evil Robot Usses, the real Bill & Ted say to the ERU's "Catch YOU later Bill and Ted!" The GRU's knock the ERU's heads off, and Bill and Ted catch them a few moments later.
• Exposed Extraterrestrials : Station. He even provides the page image. His nudity gets Lampshaded when the boys comment on his butt.
• Faint in Shock : The princesses reaction when Evil Bill & Ted reveal that they're robots.
• Famous, Famous, Fictional : Rufus introduces some guest speakers from the past to his students: Johann Sebastian Bach , Jim Martin and Ria Paschelle, a woman from the 23rd century who invented the statiophonicoxygeneticamplifiagraphiphonideliverberator.
• Fantastic Time Management : How Bill and Ted actually end up learning to play.
• Field Trip to the Past : Literally, after introducing guest speakers from the past, Rufus reminds the class about an upcoming field trip to Babylonia.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell : This is how hell appears when they first arrive: breaking rocks eternally under the watchful eye of Satan , as well as a chamber filled with many forms of Ironic Hell .
• Flowery Insults : Colonel Oats throws some fairly bizarre ones at them in hell. "You petty, base, bully-bullocked bugger billies!" "You're not strong, you're silky boys! Silk comes from the butts of Chinese worms." "I'll eat you up like the warm, toasty little buttercakes you are!" "You two-toed, no-nosed salamanders!"
• Fluffy Cloud Heaven : Well, more "Plastic Fluorescent-Backlit Clouds" Heaven, which the duo describe as "most atypical".
• Freeze-Frame Bonus : Some of the magazines and newspapers that appear detailing Would Stallyns' career in the credits are dated 2691. Maybe they get reprinted in the future.
• From Nobody to Nightmare : De Nomolos apparently went from a gym teacher to a terrorist leader and would-be world-conqueror, who planned to alter history so that the future would match his own - likely dystopian - political structure. A pretty big jump.
• At the Builder's Emporium, Death tells a smoker "See you real soon". After he passes by, you can see the smoker (played by the director) do a Double Take and quickly stub out his cigarette.
• The bizarre costumes of the people in heaven are often jokes in themselves, including one man who walks around heaven in a boxing outfit.
• Fusion Dance : The Stations can body-slam each other to form a larger, muscular STATION.
• Future Me Scares Me : Sort of. The duo quickly become afraid of what they think are their future selves, before it's revealed that they're actually evil robot doubles.
• Future Slang : "Station" is used as both a greeting and a positive adjective (in the fashion of "awesome"). Though at the concert at the end of the film, Ted says it can mean anything.
• God : Appears as a bright light in a roughly anthropoid shape who says very little.
• God Is Good : When Bill and Ted ask for help, he directs them to Station without question, even after they admit to mugging three people who had just ascended to heaven for their clothes.
• Graceful Loser : Evil Bill and Evil Ted of all people, when the Good Robot Usses charge them in the climactic concert. Not only do they congratulate the originals, but they seemingly concede defeat by tilting their heads back to give the Good Robots a better target. Evil Ted: Dude, we may have met our match! Evil Bill: Kudos to you, good human usses! Evil Bill and Evil Ted: Catch you later, Bill and Ted!! Bill and Ted: Catch you later, Bill and Ted!! (Good Robot Usses punch heads off Evil Robot Usses)
• The Grim Reaper : Starts off as a minor antagonist, but soon joins the guys. Later wins the Indy 500 on foot and gets caught in a lip-syncing scandal .
• Groin Attack : Variant: Bill and Ted use a Melvin, a front-side wedgie, on The Grim Reaper . Later the Reaper does it to De Nomolos.
• Happily Ever After : The end credits of the film feature a montage of newspaper headlines chronicling Bill & Ted's rise to fame and their music bringing about world peace and a new scientific renaissance while playing the song "God Gave Rock And Roll To You" by KISS . It's a very happy ending.
• In the future, Rufus brings Johann Sebastian Bach to his class.
• In heaven, there are various historical personages, including Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin.
• Hollywood Board Games : Death is such a Sore Loser that he keeps asking the boys for rematches and when that doesn't work, asks to play another board game. They go from Cluedo to Battleship to Twister .
• Homage : The second movie parodies the Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal where a Knight plays chess with the Grim Reaper for his soul. Bill and Ted play him with classic board games and Twister.
• Homemade Inventions : The Good Robot Usses.
• How Many Fingers? : Parodied when Ted asks his evil robot how many fingers he's about to hold up. When the robot announces "three," Ted indeed holds up three fingers. The comedy is whether Ted only held up three fingers because the robot said so.

• Bill and Ted's long fall to Hell, which takes so long they begin playing "20 Questions" to pass the time. To be fair, it was a pretty short game: Dead Bill: Hey, you wanna play Twenty Questions? Dead Ted: Okay! I got one! Dead Bill: Are you a mineral? Dead Ted: Yeah! Dead Bill: Are you a tank? Dead Ted: Whoa! Yeah!
• When this film airs on television, a commercial break is often placed in the middle of this scene, which probably makes the whole gag funnier .
• If You Die, I Call Your Stuff Dead Bill: Ted. Dead Ted: Yeah? Dead Bill: If I die, you can have my Megadeth collection. Dead Ted: But, dude, we're already dead. Dead Bill: Oh. Well then they're yours, dude!
• Ironic Echo : "Catch ya later, Bill and Ted!" First by the Evil Robots to Bill and Ted, then by Bill and Ted to the Evil Robots. Both times, the party spoken to is about to die.
• Ironic Hell : Both boys experience this after passing through Fire and Brimstone Hell for a bit.
• It's Been Done : The plot is a blend of Terminator and, of all things, KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park - which featured KISS battling Evil Robot KISS. Seriously.
• Kick the Dog : Evil Bill and Ted repeatedly try to kill animals. The Evil Robots' groping of the heroes' (rather chaste) princess girlfriends also counts in various ways.
• Kill and Replace : Evil Robot Bill & Ted are programmed to murder the originals, wreck their relationships, and ruin their performance at the battle of the bands. They even succeed, up to a point .
• Kirk's Rock : Lampshaded: Just before the boys meet the Evil Robots, they're watching that particular episode of Star Trek on TV. When the Evil Usses drag the boys up to the rock to kill them, we even get a recreation of the dramatic zoom out from Trek .
• Knight of Cerebus : The humor tones down a bit whenever De Nomolos appears. He's very straightforward and serious, though he ends up being not much of a threat in the end.
• Larynx Dissonance : Evil Bill changes his voice to one of the medieval babes to give Bill and Ted a fake breakup call, in order to lead them into the trap where they will be killed.
• LOL, 69 : Bill & Ted have crossed out the number on their apartment door and spray-painted a large "69" next to it.
• Losing Your Head : The Evil Usses' version of basketball. They end up losing their heads for good thanks to the Good Robot Usses.
• Make Wrong What Once Went Right : Chuck De Nomolos' motive.
• Manly Facial Hair : Bill develops a beard during his and Ted's 16 months of training as a way of showing how much they have toughened up, although the newspaper photos indicate he shaves it off later.
• May–December Romance : Missy and Ted's father, who's even older than Bill's father from the first movie. And then she hooks up with Chuck De Nomolos at the end of that movie. The girl Really Gets Around .
• Meaningful Name : Ms. Wardroe is actually a disguise of Rufus's .
• Men Can't Keep House : Bill and Ted's apartment is a showcase of this trope.
• Mirror Match : The Evil Robot Bill and Ted vs. the Good Robot Usses.
• Monochrome Apparition : When Bill and Ted are dead, they're grayish-blue.
• Mugged for Disguise : Bill and Ted do this to people in heaven!
• Ted mentions the princesses are celebrating their fifth year in the 20th century. They arrived in the first movie which was set in 1988 so Bogus Journey must be set in 1993 when it was released in 1991.
• The Great Leader's comment in Bill & Ted Face the Music about the concert happening 25 years ago would put Bogus Journey as happening in 1995.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain : Ties in with the Stable Time Loop . Chuck De Nomolos decides to broadcast his defeat of Bill and Ted live to the world. After he's defeated, this only ensures that Bill and Ted broadcast their first performance live all over the world, hence beginning the cycle of their music creating the future Utopia .
• Obvious Stunt Double : At one point in Bill and Ted's apartment, Alex Winter steps off his mark and reveals the face of Keanu Reeves ' body double.
• The One Thing I Don't Hate About You : Rufus mentions to the protagonists that De Nomolos was the sit-up champion of the 27th Century. At least that seems to be a compliment, it might have been meant as a goofy version of How the Mighty Have Fallen .
• Orifice Invasion : Played for Laughs when Bill and Ted's ghosts try possessing two men. They squeeze in through the ears. "I totally possessed my dad!"
• Overly Long Gag : When they get sent to hell. "Dude, this is a totally deep hole."
• Overly Long Scream : Bill and Ted fall down a pit to hell, screaming the whole way, but the pit is so deep that they eventually get tired of repeatedly screaming and start playing 20 Questions.
• Our Founder : Bill and Ted, in the future.
• Out-Gambitted : The climax of the film. Both sides' plans rely on the premise that they won the current battle in the present, which would allow them to manipulate time afterwards and rig the battle in the present to their favor. "The future belongs to the winner."
• Outside-Context Problem : No one, least of all Bill and Ted themselves, saw evil duplicates of themselves coming back to kill them, under orders from an attempted revolutionary with plans to turn the future Earth into a dystopia . But in turn, Evil B&T and De Nomolos likely didn't forsee B&T allying with the Grim Reaper and a duo of Martians to stop them, and constructing good robotic duplicates to defeat the evil ones.
• Perfect Pacifist People : Bill and Ted's future society appears to be one of these.
• Pokémon Speak : The Stations use the word "Station" for everything.
• The Power of Rock : Exaggerated, as the effects of Wyld Stallyns' music are shown via a newspaper montage at the end of the film (set to KISS 's "God Gave Rock 'n Roll To You"): Wyld Stallyns Tour Midwest; Crop Growth Up 30% Bill & Ted Tour Mideast; Peace Achieved Stallyns Use World Nuclear Arsenal to Fuel Amplifiers Air Guitar Found to Eliminate Smog Bill & Ted Named Sportsmen of the Decade Rumored W.S. Split; DOW Drops 600 Points W.S. Split A Hoax - DOW To Record High Bill and Ted: The Movie Wyld Stallyns to Play Mars - "Station!"
• The patio table at the princesses' birthday is littered with Pepsi cans. They also hold Pepsi cans in the previous scene.
• An Establishing Shot lingers on the Builder's Emporium sign to make sure you know exactly which hardware store Bill and Ted frequent. Sadly, Builder's Emporium folded two years after the film released.
• Profound by Pop Song : Bill, Ted and Death try and get into Heaven and are asked to answer what the meaning of life is for entry. They answer by quoting "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" by Poison and it works!
• Really Gets Around : Missy was married to Bill's dad in the first film, but has left him and married Ted's dad by the sequel. She also flirts with Col. Oats, and the end credits reveal that she has left Ted's dad for Chuck De Nomolos.
• Retroactive Preparation : B&T manage to turn this trope into a martial art during the showdown with De Nomolos.
• Ridiculously Human Robots : The Evil Robot Bill and Ted, who can apparently get "full-on robot chubb[ies]" from looking at a picture of the guys' girlfriends.
• Robotic Reveal : Bill punching his robotic evil twin. "Oww! You're metal, dude!"
• Robot Me : There are Bill and Ted's evil robot copies from the future, and then Station improvises another robot Bill and Ted to counter them.
• Rule of Funny : The movie runs on this. Bill growing a ZZ Top beard in 16 months is the least implausible joke in the film.
• San Dimas Time : Interestingly, the sequel seems to throw this out by allowing Bill and Ted to spend 16 months to get guitar lessons, then return to the present to win the concert. One might assume that they have to jump 16 months into the future after they win the concert, but the news articles that display over the credits don't suggest that they vanished for 16 months after their first performance.
• Sdrawkcab Name : Chuck De Nomolos is this for writer Ed Solomon.
• Sdrawkcab Speech : Additionally, the exorcism chant is "Ed and Chris [Matheson, Solomon's co-writer] will rule the world", spoken backwards: D'lrow eht elur l'liw sirhc d'na de.
• The Death subplot is a direct parody of Death from The Seventh Seal .
• Bill and Ted watch the "Arena" episode of Star Trek: The Original Series , featuring Kirk's Rock . They are then taken to Kirk's Rock to be killed by the evil robots.
• Ted possesses his father, "Like from The Exorcist 1 and 3."
• The boys quote Poison 's "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" when asked the meaning of life.
• Les Claypool of Primus wears a The Residents shirt onstage.
• Station is playing charades and miming the film Smokey and the Bandit 3 . Death guesses " Butch and Sundance: The Early Years ."
• Bill's waist-length beard in the very end is obviously a nod to ZZ Top .
• Something That Begins with "Boring" : Bill and Ted play 20 Questions while falling into Hell and waiting to land.
• Sore Loser : The Grim Reaper when he initially loses. It take several losses to the boys for him to finally give in to their demands.
• Spinning Paper : Seen during the end credits.
• Squick : An in-universe example: Death gets jealous of all the praise Station is getting and starts fishing for compliments. When Ted says Station has "an excellently huge Martian butt", Death says, "Don't overlook my butt. I work out all the time. Reaping burns a lot of calories." Bill and Ted visibly shudder at this.
• Stable Time Loop : Chuck De Nomolos is basically responsible for Wyld Stallyns' world fame, broadcasting their Battle of the Bands appearance to the world by accident in his attempt to Take Over the World . Also used tactically in the fight.
• Sufficiently Advanced Alien : Station, despite his (their?) goofy appearance.
• Tagline : "Once... They Made history. Now... They Are History."
• Technology Porn : Station's assembly of the Good Robot Usses is a Homemade Inventions version of this trope.
• Throw the Dog a Bone : Despite his Butt-Monkey status, Death finds himself enjoying the company of Bill and Ted and being part of the band. Given that much of his grim nature appears to cover up severe insecurity and loneliness, Bill and Ted are probably the first friends he'd ever had. Also, it's shown during the news montage that he managed to win the Indianapolis 500 on foot . His response? " I didn't know I could run that fast ."
• Time-Passage Beard : Bill and Ted have beards after returning from a 16-month guitar training sabbatical. Bill somehow managed to grow a ZZ Top beard in that time .
• To Hell and Back
• Took a Level in Badass : At the end of the movie, Bill and Ted use the time machine to take 16 months of intensive guitar training, going from being bad on a horrendous level to astonishingly good. Not to mention using and exploiting the Retroactive Preparation trope to its' fullest extent to stop De Nomolos.
• Treacherous Advisor : Parodied. Early on, Chuck De Nomolos is recognized by Rufus and calls him his old teacher. Turns out, he was a gym teacher.
• Trust Password : Double subverted; when the heroes' Evil Twins arrive, Ted is suspicious, but Bill convinces him to trust them. Then Ted trusts his robot counterpart after it passes a How Many Fingers? test.
• Unfolding Plan Montage : The main characters face off against the Big Bad , each telling their plans and how they enacted them, resulting in weirdness out-of-flashback as Bill, Ted, and De Nomolos, all have time travel devices.
• Unnaturally Blue Lighting : Bill and Ted are treated to this when they wake up in the afterlife, and later when they're in Death's chamber playing his games.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight : Nobody seems to find it odd when Station and the Grim Reaper are wandering through Builder's Emporium.
• Uranus Is Showing : Bill and Ted say they admire Uranus when complimenting God , then chuckle.
• Vile Villain, Saccharine Show : Even in a Darker and Edgier movie played for laughs, De Nomolos is far more evil than something you'd expect from it. (He has a little humor potential, but it's all Black Humor .)
• Visual Pun : Bill and Ted echo back "Catch ya later, Bill and Ted!" to the Evil Robot Usses... and a few seconds later, do in fact catch the robots' flying heads.
• Wedgie : The characters give The Grim Reaper one.
• The Whole World Is Watching : The villain De Nomolos causes all the world's channels to watch his New Era Speech , but Bill and Ted are able to defeat him and then their future selves play their music for all the world to see, which makes them internationally famous. Nice Job Fixing It, Villain
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? : Averted in the comic and novel adaptation. Rather than the Xanatos Speed Chess battle with DeNomolos, the boys simply find the Self-Destruct Mechanism in Evil Robot B&T's heads and throw them to DeNomolos , killing him.
• The Next Sunday A.D. example above implies the movie is set in 1993. The newspaper and magazine articles that appear over the credits are mostly dated as the year of release, 1991. Some are dated 2691 but they're presumably future reprints.
• To make it more confusing, in Bill & Ted Face the Music (released and set in 2020) has the Great Leader saying the concert happened 25 years ago. Implying that Bogus Journey takes place in 1995.
• Xanatos Speed Chess : The final confrontation between Bill and Ted and DeNomolos.
• You Already Changed the Past : The entire climax is Bill, Ted, and Chuck De Nomolos performing dueling versions of this. Except that, as Bill points out, only the winner can change history, so all the things the villain thought he planted were just decoys B&T placed to lull him into a false sense of security .

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Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)

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