No waaaay - on the 17th February 1989, Bill and Ted's Most Excellent Adventure landed in American cinemas!
Bill and Ted's roots can be traced back to a stand up routine conceived by its writers Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson whilst in college in 1987, where the characters would discuss current events with little understanding of said events. In these early days Bill and Ted were actually part of a trio, joined by a third member named Bob, who's actor eventually lost interest in the routine and bowed out early on.
Seeing the potential for their then highly relevant jab at youth culture of the time, Chris and Ed hand wrote their first draft during coffee shops meetings in '87, which took them just four days to complete. This early draft featured a lot of content that would eventually be cut for various reasons - for example it was originally planned that Bill and Ted would bring Hitler back to modern day and leave him with Deacon, however the two quickly realised how problematic this could be and so opted to replace Hitler with Napoleon. There were also supposed to be a number of other historical figures involved in their travels, including Charlemange, Babe Ruth, and Julius Ceaser, and also a cave man with whom they teach to create fire in order to light a joint.
The original time machine was also envisioned as a '69 Chevy van, however as there was already a film recently released involving a teenager travelling back in time in an American motor vehicle turned into a time machine (yeah we can't think what it is either) they opted for a phone booth, with its only similarity being the police box used in Doctor Who which, most likely, the pair were unaware existed at the time. Bill and Ted themselves were also envisioned in a much different way, with Chris and Ed's original vision of them being two 14-year-old bums sporting bell-bottoms and heavy metal t-shirts, who were painfully and obviously uncool. However, when it came to casting, things drastically shifted from uncool to most excellent.
The films' director Stephen Herek is said to have auditioned almost 300 actors for the roles of Bill and Ted, with some of the most notable names to take a pop at the roles being Pauly Shore, River Phoenix, Josh Richman, and Sean Penn - there were rumours for some time that Brendan Fraser also auditioned for a role, however he has since rebuked this claim in 2019. Keanu Reeves auditioned for the role of Ted very early on in the process, and was an instant hit with Herek, and all following auditions were based solely on how well he could picture the actors performing alongside Reeves as Bill. One of the actors called back for further auditions was Alex Winters, who got talking to Reeves whilst waiting for their auditions to start, discovering a shared love of bass guitars and motorbikes. From this a genuine bond was formed, which led to some genuine and sincere on screen chemistry that would become the backbone of what made the characters of Bill and Ted so god damn endearing to audiences the world over.
As endearing as we see them today however, studio execs at the time could not see this at all, in fact in almost all cases when shopping the script around Chris and Ed found the stuffy suits tasked with reviewing Bill and Ted simply did not get it, with many asking if there really were people who spoke like this, and one particular producer having to ask what a "dude" was. This particular producer, Dino de Laurentiis of the DEG production company, was the man who initially picked up the film and funded it, however in 1988, the films' originally planned year of release, the studio went into bankruptcy, leaving a Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure completed but lacking a distributor. Test screenings of the film shown to random youths found at malls local to the studio proved immensely popular as hoped by the creators, which piqued the interest of the otherwise clueless distribution companies, and a bidding war briefly transpired, before rights eventually fell to Nelson Entertainment and Orion Pictures.
Despite its shaky production history and measly $6.5 million, budget Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure managed to rake in a most bodacious $40 million domestically, which would indicate a positive reception, right? Wrong. It turns out critics at the time were equally as scared and confused by the youthful lingo featured in Bill and Ted, and thus most reviews lambasted the film, showing just what old and miserable fuckers these no doubt older middle aged white men were. Audiences however absolutely loved the film, and its popularity spawned a short-lived animated series and promotional cereal run, as well as a comic series and a video game, the latter of which resulted in a competition in Nintendo Power magazine in which one lucky reader was given the chance to win the actual phone booth from the film. There was then of course the equally excellent sequel, Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, and Bill and Ted Face the Music, which at the time of writing is still in development and has a scheduled release date of August 2020. Oh yeah shit, there was also a yearly Bill and Ted Halloween Adventure in Universal for its Halloween Horror Nights from 1997-2017, however after twenty years it was finally canned. Bummer.
So there you have it folks, the illustrious and most excellent history of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Party on, dudes.
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