Rounding out the last of the films salvaged from my brother's house up north, Corrie and I popped in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, hoping to enjoy it.
At least I was consciously hoping to enjoy it. I didn't want it to be like watching Voltron or He-Man, shows I grew up with but watching them now I cringe, barely able to sit through more than a few hundred frames at a time.
But this is a movie, right? Not a poorly funded and animated twenty-two minute commercial for toys, so there's hope that it might have aged well, right?
I am happy to report that it did age well.
There are a few things to which I'd like to speak: Bill and Ted filling the lovable idiot role for their time and place. These two are as ignorant as Beavis and Butt-head, while without the social critique. Their campy antics also play well as a bridge from the 80s, when the film was made and released, to the 90s, the era most resembling the time period in which the film takes place.
To me, Back to the Future is the 80s movie, a movie so entrenched in the times in which it was produced that it actually transcends that time period and exists on a different plane. That's a compliment. There are plenty of 80s movies that are obviously from the 80s and are garbage.
To me the first Bill and Ted movie has never been an 80s movie. Maybe I'm being fuzzy-headed here, but as the story is about a specific type of future, I've always felt that it projected the immediate future that actually came after it, that it in fact is somehow a 90s movie.
Does that make sense? Whatever...
The boys need to pass a history presentation or their band will be broken up as they fail out of school and Ted is shipped off to military school. That the fate of the universe rests on their band making it is far too absurd to be an 80s movie trope. Part of their history project is to explain how specific historical figures would feel about today's world. A helper is sent from the future to help the boys out by giving them their time-traveling phone booth. The helper: George Carlin.
Bill and Ted decide to "borrow" (see "kidnap") certain historical figures, take them to their presentation and get their collective take on modern America, and then return them safely to their respective times.
If executed well, this premise has promise. Fortunately, it was executed rather well. Napoleon slips through first, and we see that he's a dick when he's cheating at bowling or cutting in line at the water-slide park (his "swim trunks" are just his undergarments, which are hilarious and accurate). The first figure the boys grab intentionally is Billy the Kid. A scene good for a laugh has Bill and Ted about to be attacked by a group of large cowboys, and Bill says, "So, we're totally weak, and couldn't possibly fight you," which is actually kind of a reasonable thing to say.
Billy the Kid represents young America for the boys; an entity that would recognize the society of the 1980s, or at least recognize that institutionally it resembles what he left. He's instrumental to some of the plans Bill and Ted have, and they need him from time to time.
During the time when the group of historical figures are left to their own devices in a mall, their own reactions to the modern world begin to manifest. Joan of Arc takes over an aerobics class; Genghis Khan dons football pads and favors aluminum bats to his war-club; Beethoven takes over a music store's display keyboard and makes "synergy"; after getting arrested Sigmund Freud slyly interrogates his interrogator; Lincoln spells out his unusual last name for the police only to be given attitude by the detective.
One last comparison to Back to the Future that I think shows the 80s/90s split in this late 80s flick: the time-travel look. The DeLorean hitting 88 mph activates the flex capacitor, splits space-time open and spits you out on the same spot you started at the new time period. The sparks and laser-light show generated by this time-travel is created by conventional animation by the looks of it. It is quite iconic about what was good about big 80s movies.
If you've seen Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure picture the time-travel: phone booth zooming through tubes that seem to invoke different channels of historical/futuristic space-time. Notice though, using your memory, that it's computer animated. It's easier to notice while you watch, of course.
Their ignorant mispronunciations are also rather funny: "So-crates", "Frood", and "Beeth-oven".
Now, a sequel was spawned called Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, though it was originally titled Bill and Ted go to Hell, because during the course of the movie the two do die and go to hell. When I first saw the movie, in the theater like the first one for the first time, I remember thinking that it was crappy, or not as good as the first one...my aversion to visiting places like heaven or hell in movies was already in place even at that early age, but really just more of a disappointment.
Recently, when reading up on the first movie for this post, I read a synopsis of the sequel and realized 1) how it ultimately ties every loose end together from the first film and almost explains how the future where the Wyld Stallions are the new (basically) deity can come to exist; and 2) how utterly original it is.
In 2004 I read about a movie, and it made me want to go see it. I tried to convince my friends to come and watch it, unsuccessfully at the time, and by the time I was able to find a day to take Corrie, the two of us had to go to Arroyo Grande to see it, it having left San Luis Obispo. The movie: Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. Thankfully that bastion of smart stoner humor has become part of pop culture. Corrie and I went to see the sequel, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, in the theater in Brooklyn. It's basically a very crass copy of the first, with higher stakes. Besides George W. being made a pot-smoking sympathetic character talking about cock-meat sandwiches, it wasn't particularly original.
So, ...Excellent Adventure and ...Bogus Journey gives two rather random and original time-travel comedies.
Originality is always nice.
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